Intuit Selects Constant Contact as Email Marketing Provider for Small Business Customers
Intuit Selects Constant Contact as Email Marketing Provider for Small Business Customers
QuickBooks 2008 users now able to easily move customer contact information to Constant Contact through new integrated tool
WALTHAM, Mass. — Constant Contact([R]), Inc. (NasdaqGM: CTCT), a leading provider of email marketing and online surveys for small organizations, today announced that its email marketing service was chosen as one of the tools featured in the Intuit([R]) Marketing Tools Center. This online center is designed to provide millions of small businesses with the marketing tools needed to grow their businesses.
Constant Contact is featured on the Intuit Marketing Tools Center along with other industry-leading products and services for small businesses, including Google Adwords[TM], Yahoo! Search Marketing([R]), and Intuit Websites powered by Homestead, an Intuit company. Through the Intuit Marketing Tools Center, businesses and organizations can sign up for a free trial of Constant Contact’s SpeakUp!(SM) Email Marketing tool, where they can create and send professional email newsletters, learn more about the value of email marketing, and even try out other great tools, including Constant Contact’s online survey service, ListenUp!(SM) Survey.
“We are excited to be part of Intuit’s Marketing Tools Center and to be aligned with some of the top marketing leaders in the industry,” said Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact. “Intuit and Constant Contact are like-minded companies, both focused on meeting the needs of small businesses and committed to helping them learn and grow. Our target audience aligns perfectly with Intuit’s core customer base, which makes this relationship such a good fit.”
As a part of the new relationship with Intuit, Constant Contact has also launched a new integration tool, the Constant Contact InfoTransfer Tool, that enables QuickBooks([R]) Pro and Premier Edition 2008 users with Windows XP to transfer their existing customer contact list directly into Constant Contact from QuickBooks. This ability to instantly build a target list saves small businesses time when creating their permission-based contact lists to send email marketing communications and build targeted campaigns.
“Aligning our small business resources, expertise, tools, and services with Intuit is a fantastic opportunity for Constant Contact,” said Len Bruskiewitz, director of partner programs, Constant Contact. “This new relationship helps broaden Constant Contact’s reach to small businesses and organizations, all of which can benefit from the power of email marketing to help them grow their businesses.”
To help small businesses and organizations learn more about email marketing, Intuit and Constant Contact are offering a series of online webinars. The upcoming webinars include email marketing best practices, how email marketing can help grow a small business, as well as a demonstration of the Constant Contact InfoTransfer Tool, and can be found at: http://www.quickbooksgroup.com/qblibrary/radio/webinarSignup.html.
About Constant Contact, Inc. – Launched in 1998, Constant Contact, Inc. is a leading provider of email marketing and online survey tools for small organizations, including small businesses, associations, and nonprofits. To learn more, please visit www.constantcontact.com or call (781) 472-8100.
Dwyer Technology – making the transition to the Intuit Partner Platform
December 13, 2008
Dwyer Technology – making the transition to the Intuit Partner Platform
Joe Dwyer, owner and President of Dwyer Technology recently joined the Intuit Partner Platform team at the Adobe MAX Conference in San Francisco. As an existing Silver IDN developer with an active QuickBooks SDK application currently on the Intuit Marketplace called MobileBiz (an app enabling customers to take their QuickBooks anywhere they go via their mobile phone) and as one of the early adopters of the Intuit Partner Platform with a new Workplace application, we took the opportunity to talk to Joe about his experience on building his new app, TriggerConnect, on Intuit Partner Platform.
What is your new IPP application for the Intuit Workplace?
My application is called TriggerConnect is the fastest and easiest way for a customer to keep up to date with team members working on client projects. It is available as a beta on the Intuit Workplace. With TriggerConnect workers can update each other on all the latest client happenings in a “twitter-like” way, as well as attach photos and other documents for all to access.
The information from TriggerConnect is attached to your existing QuickBooks customer records enabling a single place to view the latest customer updates and contact information, without limiting access to only those that use QuickBooks on a day to day basis.
So, Joe: How long did it take you to build the app?
With the benefits of the Intuit Partner Platform, TriggerConnect went from concept to product launch in six weeks.
OK…So, what was your Flex learning curve?
Our expertise is in building applications that integrate with QuickBooks, but we had minimal Flex expertise at the start. Having several good Flex books and utilizing resources on the web was definitely a good help and we now consider ourselves well versed in the Flex language and techniques.
How was your transition to the Intuit Partner Platform from the traditional QuickBooks SDK?
The transition to the IPP from the traditional QuickBooks SDK was made easier because we have experience building dozens of applications that integrate with QuickBooks using the traditional SDK. So, we know the data model of QuickBooks well and it made it easier to transition to the IPP. Having servers, hosting, registration, and billing all setup by the IPP also removed a large development and ongoing infrastructure cost from our implementation.
You are also available to help other developers build on IPP?
DwyerTech exists to build applications that integrate with QuickBooks. We do this both for companies wanting to have a certified application they can sell, and for those that simply want to eliminate data entry within QuickBooks. Doing this within the Intuit Partner Platform will enable us to have more flexibility and deliver working SaaS applications at less cost to our ISV customers. Being one of the first developers to jump into IPP enables us to work closely with Intuit to make sure we have the core expertise and understand the framework to the deepest level.
We’re looking forward to enabling companies to be more efficient and automated through the use of their existing QuickBooks and the IPP. We have several initiatives that include mobile applications, e-commerce integration, and improved communication within small businesses. The IPP is a perfect solution for our company as it enables us to focus on the application logic and remove the issues and cost of hosting data in “the cloud”.
You can see a video of the TriggerConnect in action or try the Beta of the app directly within the Intuit Workplace.
Posted by Alex Barnett on December 13, 2008 in IPP, video | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (4)
From the Editor: Consumer Software Driving the Best New Enterprise Features
From the Editor: Consumer Software Driving the Best New Enterprise Features
What features will be included in future enterprise software products? The answer lies in today’s consumer software. by James E. Powell
12/16/2008
In the last six months, in dozens of meetings, vendors and IT professionals have told me how the user base for enterprise software is rapidly changing. That shift will have ripple effects in the software they use, and two consumer products I’ve seen lately are leading the way.
Users have never been happy with IT’s project backlog. When working as a developer, I hated to tell my business users that the list of projects was still too long to complete within a year — or two. We could prioritize projects all day long, but my staff could only make a dent in the dynamic list of projects. There were few user tools to cut through the backlog — a report-writing tool for a mainframe payroll system used six-digit field codes users had to enter on 80-column coding sheets (then send to the data entry department to have them created on punch cards). Yes, it was the stone age of computing, when drag and drop hadn’t yet surfaced.
Since then, as vendors and IT managers will attest, tools have radically improved, in part as a response to the new (and younger) crop of employees who are no longer afraid to take an application by its horns to get the job done. Driven by experience with everything from complex search commands to using mash-ups on personal Web pages, users are no longer shy about digging in and getting what they want.
Where do enterprise application developers get their ideas for features? Lately, many of the best ideas I’ve seen are introduced in consumer software. From the first time I saw a demonstration of “drill down” in Intuit’s Quicken, I was hooked. Who knew you could get to exactly the information you needed so quickly? In a later version, Quicken (and Microsoft Money) introduced a single screen filled with key information (bank balances, invoices due, past-due receipts) long before enterprise vendors were touting “dashboards” and scorecards.
As we look ahead to the application trends for 2009, three features I’ve seen recently in consumer and SMB software products stand out as showing the way to more useful software.
Putting Tools in Users’ Hands
Last year I experimented with Intuit’s QuickBase (see my review at http://esj.com/News/article.aspx?editorialsId=2119), and since that time I’ve been using it just about every day to track editorial content and deadlines. I love it. Earlier this year I was introduced to TrackVia (http://www.trackvia.com), a competing do-it-yourself online database and reporting tool. The interest in and sales of TrackVia and QuickBase are a clear sign that both companies have a good thing going — easy software as a service that any end-user will appreciate.
TrackVia puts considerable database power in a remarkably streamlined interface. You can build a database simply by importing an Excel spreadsheet (the program figures out the right file types by examining each column’s data and format). From there, it’s easy to create data entry forms, build reports, and build logic into fields to simplify data entry (and reduce errors). Like QuickBase, TrackVia’s performance is nimble over a simple broadband connection using a cable modem, and pricing is attractive. Best of all, because it’s a SaaS application, data backup is not your job.
TrackVia also has features any IT department would love, including the ability to create a Web form, host it on your own site, and have the built-in logic automatically add records to your TrackVia database.
Putting tools like TrackVia into the hands of users risks the age-old problem of developing data silos — isolated, out-of-sync collections of data that can be difficult to control. The trade off: with a bit of control, you can give users the ability to get their work done without draining IT resources with tweaks to reports or requests to build reports “just like the last one but with this minor tweak” — requests that end up in a long queue and frustrate users and IT alike.
Helping Yourself
I’ve never seen a help desk that was adequately staffed. On the other hand, I’ve never known a help desk staff that always had all the answers once you reached them. In fact, I’ve often found that calling out over my cubicle wall about a problem often brought an answer faster than being put on hold or adding a request to the help desk’s queue.
That’s part of what impressed me with Intuit’s latest QuickBooks Accounting Premier 2009, an accounting package for the SMB market. Having a problem? Context sensitive help has long been a feature of most software applications, of course. QuickBooks now incorporates its context-sensitive Live Community right in the product, which shows answers to commonly-asked questions on its online forum — on the theory (to which I subscribe) that other users are often the best source of correct answers to your questions. (See illustration at right.) I hope we’ll see more public forums linked to application screens. If you don’t find an answer, you can leave a question and the interface will note when an answer is posted.
Instant Messages to Co-Workers
IT has long fought to control instant messaging programs, fearing (rightly so) that the information users can transmit via IM — not to mention the security holes they open up in an enterprise — isn’t worth the convenience offered.
QuickBooks 2009′s other new feature that caught my eye is its ability to send an instant message about a particular accounting item (company information, invoice, etc.) to another QuickBooks user in your company and begin a text-based chat. OK, it’s not rocket science, but it’s the first time I’ve seen the feature built-in to a small-business product in this way. The QuickBooks administrator defines the user base, so it’s only this set of users who can communicate with each other, eliminating the worry that confidential information can easily be sent outside the organization. The messaging client is built-in, so there’s no worry about violating firewalls, either.
The Shifting User Base
There’s no doubt that consumer software and online sites are leading the way in innovating features. Enterprises must come to grips with the fact that consumer products are driving their business users’ feature demands, be they application support for portable devices (such as Blackberrys) or support for combining data from multiple applications (à la mash-ups).
From what I’ve seen recently, developers of consumer software are ahead of the curve. Let’s hope enterprise developers can catch up.
http://www.esj.com/enterprise/print.aspx?editorialsId=3446
Intuit goes global using mobiles
Intuit goes global using mobiles
Intuit aims to serve small businesses globally using Web accounting services on mobile phones
Richard Morochove
PC World
Wednesday, December 3, 2008; 12:19 AM
Intuit’s QuickBooks small business accounting software runs the back office for many of North America’s 31 million small businesses. Now Intuit plans to expand globally by targeting 10 Asian countries, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea. Collectively, these 10 Asian countries have 250 million small businesses.
You won’t see many notebook computers in the street stalls of Jakarta. Yet even a street sweeper has a mobile phone. So Intuit plans to grow globally by developing mobile-based versions of QuickBooks at its Global Business Division office, based in Mississauga, Canada.
I toured Intuit’s new Global Business office, located just west of Toronto, at its recent official opening. The building is equipped with the typical Intuit employee-friendly furnishings, including nap rooms and a yoga studio. An HD teleconferencing suite will cut down on the need for 20-hour long trans-Pacific flights to consult with employees based overseas. About 40 work here now, but eventually more than 250 will call the new office home.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Alex Linter, president of Intuit’s Global Business Division, said all the new apps will be Web-based because it’s easier to distribute.
I expect some aspects of Intuit’s new mobile technology will work their way into American versions of QuickBooks. And why not? The processing power and storage capacity of an iPhone 3G or BlackBerry Bold rivals that of the notebook PC I relied upon a decade ago.
© 2008 PC World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved
Most admired corporates: #3 Intuit Canada
Most admired corporates: #3 Intuit Canada
Financial Post Published: Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Gene Lewis of Intuit Canada says the company’s culture sets it apart from competition.
Company: Intuit Canada CEO: Brad Smith Number of employees worldwide: 8,000 plus Number of employees Canada: 400 Read more
What’s New in QuickBooks 2009: Part I
Column: The QuickBooks Advisor
By Doug Sleeter - From the Dec. 2008 Issue
Intuit recently released the 2009 version of QuickBooks. Each year, I poll members of our network who work in the trenches to help you think about the impact clients will realize from the new versions of QuickBooks. Here, in part one of a two-part column, I’ll discuss several of the new features including the new company snapshot, bank reconciliation improvements, multi-currency, external accountant user designation, improvements in multi-user functionality, list improvements, the backwards compatibility features, and the new Help and support features.
As part of Intuit’s new corporate look, the QuickBooks brand has changed to “Intuit QuickBooks.” All of the packaging, colors, logos, etc. have a completely new look. 
Intuit QuickBooks comes in several different editions, each of which is targeted to a different business type. For small businesses just starting out, QuickBooks Simple Start Edition (free) is available as a single-user only, basic accounting product. This edition does not have inventory, accounts payable, budgets or multi-user capability, but it has great features for the small business just starting out. The free version allows you to track and invoice up to 20 customers, but there is also a $99.95 version of Simple Start that allows for thousands of customers. And if your client uses this product, you can work with their data using the Premier Accountant Edition. Also new this year, is an entry-level online version of QuickBooks called QuickBooks Online Basic. This single-user version is only $9.95/month.
Moving up the line is QuickBooks Pro, which adds multi-user capabilities, inventory, accounts payable, time tracking, estimates and budgeting. Next up the line is QuickBooks Premier along with all of the vertical “flavors” (industry-specific editions) of the Premier product. While each of the flavors is based on the same core features, each differs slightly by having different default settings, reports and Help screens. The edition all accountants should have is QuickBooks Premier Accountant Edition because with this edition installed, the accountant can “toggle” between all of the other flavors of the product. Essentially, the Accountant Edition is a superset of all the other editions.
QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions is at the high-end of the line. The versions are different (we’re now at version 9 while the Pro and Premier editions are up to version 2009). With the Enterprise Solutions product, you get all the features of the other editions in addition to having up to 20 users and an unlimited number of customers, vendors and items.
As I review the features of the product, I use the product name “QuickBooks” generically because, unless specified, the features or behaviors are the same or similar in the whole product line.
NEW FEATURES OF QUICKBOOKS 2009 AND ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS 9.0
COMPANY SNAPSHOT
QuickBooks Pro 2009, Premier 2009 and QuickBooks Enterprise 9.0 offer a new Company Snapshot for reporting company information and accessing critical QuickBooks tasks in a single window.
This view is a digital dashboard and offers real-time visual views of a company’s important information. The new QuickBooks Company Snapshot offers these details as shown in the figure to the right.
IMPROVED BANK RECONCILIATION
One of my longtime requests has finally been delivered! You can now sort by columns in the bank reconciliation window! This is a small addition, but it has huge benefits for the users, and accountants will really appreciate this new functionality.
MULTI-CURRENCY TRACKING
QuickBooks Pro 2009, Premier 2009 and Enterprise 9.0 now support all global currencies, making it easier for you to support clients with international business relationships. This new feature allows you to set your home currency and the currency for each customer, vendor, bank account, accounts receivable account and credit card. It includes a free downloadable update for worldwide exchange rates, and it reflects all currency conversions into the reports in the home currency. This feature is very well integrated into all of the workflows and reports in QuickBooks, and I think you’ll find it very easy to use.
EXTERNAL ACCOUNTANT USER
New for QuickBooks 2009 is a new type of user called the External Accountant shown to the right.
You can now assign a user as an External Accountant. As an accounting professional using the Client Data Review feature (to be reviewed in next month’s column), you will want to request that your client create a user name for you and assign the new External Accountant Type. If you have the Admin login, then you can create a new External Accountant user type for yourself. Logging into your client’s QuickBooks data file as an External Accountant gives you:
• Complete Admin access, with the exception that you cannot create or edit users or view sensitive customer credit card numbers.
• Access to the Client Data Review feature in a client’s 2009 QuickBooks Pro, Premier (all editions), and Enterprise (all editions). You can access the Client DataReview feature using QuickBooks Pro 2009, Premier 2009 or Enterprise Solutions 9.0 using your External Accountant login. That means you can always have access to the Client Data Review whether you visit your client’s site or interact with them via Remote Access, even without the Accountant version.
IMPROVED MULTI-USER FUNCTIONALITY
Multi-User Backup
With QuickBooks 2009, you can make a QuickBooks backup (QBB file extension) in multi-user mode.QuickBooks ‘In Product’ Instant Messenger
QuickBooks 2009 includes the QuickBooks Instant Messenger feature. This feature is available when you are logged into the same data file in multi-user mode. QuickBooks Instant Messenger does not keep a “chat log” at this time and can only be turned off by ending the process in Windows Task Manager.Features of the QuickBooks Instant Messenger include:
• The ability to send a message to other QuickBooks users (who are logged into that specific QuickBooks data file).
• The ability to see which users are currently logged into the data file.
• The ability to close the QuickBooks file for currently logged in users.
QUICKFILTER LIST FUNCTIONALITY
QuickBooks Pro 2009, Premier 2009 and Enterprise 9.0 include the ability to search for customers, jobs, vendors or items within a list (See Figure 7). This is new functionality for the Pro and Premier product and was previously only available with QuickBooks Enterprise. In the Items List, you can filter the search results on Item Name/Number, Description (Sales) and Purchase Description, Preferred Vendor, Man. Part Number and any of the Custom fields.
CREATE DUPLICATE ITEMS
The Items List also has a new function to create duplicate items. Select an item on the Item List, right-click and select Duplicate Item. The result is a New Item dialog that displays with all the details of the duplicated item. Edit the name of the item or, by default, QuickBooks will insert DUP (for duplicate) in front of the name.
IMPROVED ACCOUNTANT’S COPY
The Accountant’s Copy functionality has been improved this year to prevent the problem when a single error caused the whole “import” of the accountant’s changes to fail. Also, the accountant can now adjust the 1099 settings and edit or merge classes with the accountant’s copy.
BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY WITH 2008 FILES
QuickBooks Premier Accountant 2009 software can access Pro or Premier 2008 and 2009 data using the Accountant’s Copy file sharing method, allowing you to perform your review and return the data back to your client in either 2008 or 2009 format. Of course, feature changes that are new for QuickBooks 2009 will not transfer back to a client’s 2008 data file.
LIVE COMMUNITY IN QUICKBOOKS
Live Community is a community Help function available within the software. Live Community acts as a real-time message board for asking and answering questions without leaving the QuickBooks application.
SUMMARY
The 2009 version has a few great new features for both accountants and clients. My favorite improvement is the Bank Reconciliation column sorting, and I think clients will cheer when they first discover this new capability.
See my column next month for part two of “What’s New In QuickBooks 2009,” when I’ll discuss the new Client Data Review feature and the Intuit Statement Writer (a replacement for the Financial Statement Designer).
In the meantime, if you’d like to compare the various editions of the product or dig deeper into the features, go to Intuit’s site at http://proadvisor.intuit.com/product/whatsnew/index.jsp.
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