Sage Software has released the latest version of its contact and customer management software, Act by Sage 2009 (11.0), improving the program's Microsoft Outlook integration, calendar and activity visibility, and database search features.

Web-based accounting software developer NetSuite cut its net loss for the second quarter of 2008 and grew its revenue 43 percent compared to the year-ago quarter.

Kaspersky Lab rolled out the latest versions of its antivirus and security software.

Payroll is becoming a seminal battleground in accounting software, with more than a dozen major companies offering a variety of programs. And that doesn't begin to measure new competition from banks and other financial services firms.Nor is there any consensus on the format. Established online payroll services such as CompuPay and MPay are now seeing additional competition from the likes of ADP's Run and Intuit Online Payroll. But service bureaus are likewise making a comeback as they diversify their offerings and compete more strongly on price, as the new myPay service from Thomson-Reuters is demonstrating.

INTUIT TO CUT JOBS

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch said this about trust: "You know it when you feel it." Trust is equivalent to confidence, and is critical to learning and change. By building trust, projects take less time, are less disruptive and more successful. This applies to any type of change within a firm, but is especially important to technology, where change is rapid and projects often cost more and take longer to complete than anticipated.

Sage Software doesn’t track the number of accounting firms among its resellers. And that’s a very big symbol of what’s happened in the software reselling market. State of the Art, the company that Sage acquired to help form Sage Software, enlisted thousands of CPA firms and its literature used to report the number representing its MAS 90 line.

Seventeen years ago, members of the California Society of CPAs were grappling with the problem of how to deal with the large number of databases in an accounting office.

It seems that there always has to be a “killer” application to justify our interest and efforts in using PCs. Spreadsheets were the first of these, and have been followed over the years by word processing, desktop publishing, customer relationship management and, most recently, document management.Some of the fascination with document management comes about because many users think that it’s effectively the “paperless office.”

MICROSOFT SHIPS LATEST DYNAMICS AXMicrosoft has released Dynamics AX 2009, with upgraded features for compliance and multi-site organizations. The latest version of the enterprise resource planning software can run multiple legal entities from a central location and provide a single view of financial and supply chain information around the world.

What a firm knows today may not be relevant in the future, and many risk a significant loss of knowledge when partners retire. Fostering a culture that efficiently transfers knowledge is crucial. Is your firm’s knowledge centered mostly in its partner group? If so, it may be unable to remain competitive in the future.To many partners, knowledge is tantamount to power. But if a firm’s intelligence is locked away within its partner group, it cannot grow much beyond its current profit levels. Systems, processes and culture will inevitably require an overhaul to remain competitive in the future. Why? A firm’s intelligence revolves around information, experience and wisdom. The speed, leverage and scale at which a firm can transfer this block of knowledge are determined by the quality of its training program and willingness to share information.

Accounting software developer Open Systems has released OSAS Banking for companies that need to do electronic banking.

Thomson Reuters' Tax & Accounting business has added OneSource Entity Manager to its line of OneSource Tax software.

No transcript of a speech by Kirill Tatarinov, given at last week’s Worldwide Partner Conference, has been posted on Microsoft’s Web site. One rationale offered was the talks given by executives at Tatarinov’s level—he’s the head of Microsoft Business Solutions—weren’t posted. My memory was that he was one of three keynotes shown on the WPC Web page when I first looked—and, given Microsoft’s lavish use of the word, keynote—it didn’t seem like there would be such a shortage of space for transcripts. Moreover, nobody has been able to come up with a transcript of Tatarinov's speech in the last week.

Microsoft introduced Dynamics CRM Accelerators at its Worldwide Partner Conference to help its customers and partners benefit from new functionality in Dynamics CRM on a more frequent basis.

Personal computers revolutionized a lot of things, including the way that bookkeeping and accounting is performed. Before the Apple //, TRS-80, and IBM PC, bookkeeping was a manual process, and general ledgers were, for the most part, exactly that — large hard-covered binders containing T-Account paper with manual entries. Sure, computers were being used for accounting, but with the buy-in costing tens of thousands of dollars on the low end, the average small business or accounting firm could at best afford an accounting machine such as those sold by NCR and Burroughs.

SEC URGES XBRL ON MUTUAL FUNDSShortly after proposing requirements for public companies to start filing their financial statements with interactive data tags, the Securities and Exchange Commission wants mutual fund companies to begin filing risk and return information using the technology.

Internal and external forces are driving change in the profession, with a host of new options and requirements surfacing almost every day. Uncertainty often lingers even among the most experienced partners and IT leaders. How a firm navigates these changes will predict its success, and there is no better time than now to take a step back and examine how to be most effective at change management.From my perspective, I see multiple definitions of change management:

In announcing a decision to lay off 7 percent of its work force, Intuit couched the decision of terms of realigning its business to support what it called Connected Services.

“How many of your firms have document management systems?”