Creative Solutions, a provider of business software and part of the Thomson Corp., and Rivet Software, a financial management and Extensible Business Reporting Language software developer, have partnered to make Rivet's Dragon Tag and Dragon View XBRL applications available to CS customers.

NetSuite Inc., an on-demand business software provider, unveiled NetSuite - Software Edition, a software company-geared version of their online flagship software system.NetSuite - Software Edition has updated three specific areas of its original online edition to meet the special needs of software companies. The new edition enhances the financial management, customer relationship management and dashboards of the software system.

SAGE BUYS NORWEGIAN SOFTWARE FIRM: The Sage Group has a deal in place to acquire Norwegian software and accounting firm Visma for approximately $584 million.With 200,000 customers, Visma is the largest Scandinavian vendor of business management solutions for small and midsized businesses. Visma's revenues for 2005 were approximately $290 million, up almost $40 million from the 2004 figures. As of December 31, Visma had gross assets of approximately $345 million.

Microsoft's annual business software confab, Convergence 2006, centered on the combination of Microsoft business products into one Microsoft enterprise resource planning system, and also on converging communication devices for both work and home."The opportunity to do better software has never been stronger," said Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates, in a keynote address to roughly 7,000 attendees. "We talk about this digital decade and people living a digital work style or a digital lifestyle when they go home -and that is becoming more and more commonly accepted. As you move things away from paperwork and onto the digital approach, everything is software value-added."

Recruiting quality, experienced people: It's the No. 1 issue facing the CPA and IT clients we coach.There is a "science" to recruiting, a series of tasks that, when done, usually will produce some candidates. These tasks include defining the duties, skills and compensation for each new hire, identifying sources for finding candidates, and agreeing on who will be involved in screening and how you will make your offer.

If there were a single word to describe the state of the not-for-profit marketplace, it would be "accountability."The scrutiny given many nonprofits in the wake of the tsunami and hurricane crises of the past 18 months, combined with some high-profile scandals among national and local nonprofits, has done for this market what Enron did for public corporations - driven the demand for clear audit trails and better reporting of nonprofit financial information.

What are portals and why are they one of the hottest technologies in client service?While definitions differ, to me a portal is a secure Web site where clients can store, access and retrieve business content.

Intuit will host its first QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions User Conference at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass in Phoenix. The two-day conference, starting on May 31, will consist of Intuit executives, industry experts and midsized business QuickBooks Enterprise users.

NetSuite Inc. announced that users of its business software will be able to use a new module, Google OneBox for Enterprise, for added flexibility when searching business data across a company.

CPAs are increasingly using technologies in new ways in their practice. Data mining and data analysis are two applications that have been particularly hot as of late. Interestingly, CPAs aren't the only ones taking advantage of these advances in technology. Taxing authorities are also doing so.

SAGE SOFTWARE REVEALS AGREEMENT WITH TIMELINE: Global business software provider Sage has acquired non-exclusive rights to data mart patents from Timeline Inc., a Seattle-based business applications developer.The data mart capabilities to retrieve and analyze past data in a more segmented version of a data warehouse will be integrated into Sage's enterprise resource planning, accounting, customer relationship management and business intelligence products.

When Hurricane Rita ripped through southwest Louisiana last fall, Kenneth Quirk, co-owner of CPA firm Quirk and Associates, was without power and water for almost two weeks."This area had 500 tornadoes taking place during the hurricane. It devastated 50 miles south of us," said Quirk. "Cameron Parish was wiped off the map! Just down the street, there were buildings with their roofs blown right off and water damage to all their equipment."

One year after talks began between Microsoft Corp. and channel partner NexVue Analytics Corp. - a business analytics software provider for the mid-market - the pair have collaborated on a new business intelligence product for Microsoft Dynamics SL called Business Intelligence Optimization."I think we're going to have a very interesting offering for the mid-market that is typically not available for them," said Eric de Jager, director of Microsoft Dynamics SL. "The costs, as well as the level of complexity, tend to be out of reach for them."

Advocates of value-added billing have been loudly declaring, at least for the last several years, that time & billing is an application that is no longer needed. Despite all of these protestations, T&B continues to sell very well, and has even added a vendor or two over the past five years or so. That's pretty impressive performance for an application that's supposedly way past its prime.There are a number of reasons for T&B's ongoing popularity. One is that perhaps the pundits are wrong. While value-added billing may make a lot of sense, time-based billing is still the prevalent method.

Performance is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a) the execution of an action, or b) something accomplished. The question is: Are people accomplishing the right things in firms today?Charge hours have been the primary measure of performance in many firms. However, the profession is moving from an effort-based to a results-based economy, and charge hours may be only one of many gauges the firm pilot must watch as he flies the plane.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Microsoft's much ballyhooed Small Business Accounting program is this--neither a bang nor a whimper.

In what Thomson Elite said is the most significant product launch in its 58 years, the manufacturer rolled out the latest version of its flagship business suite, Elite 3E, a business software platform for practice management.

The pattern was unmistakable: Outlook, Sharepoint, business applications. Outlook, Sharepoint, business applications.

Epicor Software Corp., a manufacturer of business software for midsized companies, announced that it has completed a financial restatement for 2003 and 2004, and said that, separately, it would lower its profit expectations for 2006.

INTUIT'S 2Q REVENUES UP 15 PERCENT: Intuit Inc. announced that its second-quarter revenues for the 2006 fiscal year had increased 15 percent over last year's numbers, to $742.7 million.The company said that growth was driven by strong sales of QuickBooks software and add-on solutions and TurboTax products and services. Revenue growth also benefited from changes in the TurboTax offering and pricing, which shifted approximately $35 million of revenue into the second quarter that in prior years would have been recognized in the third quarter. Without the timing shift, Intuit estimated that revenue would have increased 9 percent.