The next feature pack for Business ByDesign has been released last week for use by new customers. In order to deliver new functionality to the market as soon as possible new customers will be able to use each feature pack a few weeks earlier than existing customers. For details on this process check out my Supporting 5 releases at a time in the cloud.
Even though it’s only available for 4 days (including a weekend) we already see first partners starting to implement it at their customers:
https://twitter.com/#!/andeiss/status/163919985159315456
Of course all the new features will be rolled out via the official channels such as SAP’s help portal.
Nevertheless I wanted to give you a quick summary of the major enhancements in this feature pack:
Co-Innovation
First and foremost this is the first release where we were able to include ideas from our customers directly into the development.
Even though development was already under way when we really ramped-up with our customers’ ideas forum we were still able to deliver about 40 ideas coming directly from our existing customers. Details on this will follow in a separate post.
Mobile
One of the focus areas was mobile:
- In addition to the existing mobile apps for iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Phone Feature Pack 3.5 will now also bring a mobile app for Android phones
- A new iPad app allows your sales people to show your products to customers directly on their iPad. They can check availability of their products (if they are online). Enter orders becomes really easy by having a look at the customer’s order history and you can enter them even when you are offline! Btw: this app originally started also as a co-innovation project with one of our long-term customers.
- Beside the already existing analytics app for iPad – Dashboard – and the mentioned sales catalog app, there will be a third app designed specifically for the iPad: It allows the user to run the same application functionality on the iPad than in the browser. It will only offer limited functionality in the CRM area for now, but the main focus is also a different one (my personal opinion): With this app as a framework partners will be able to build their add-ons in the way that they run in this app as well. More details on this in the future as well.
Functional enhancements
Just a few examples:
- Milestone billing for customer projects
- Revenue recognition rules now also available for customer contracts
- Multi-level approval for sales orders and purchase orders
- Multi-customer projects
- Interfaces to integrate third-party logistic providers
- Asset procurement enhancements
- Multiple enhancements for partners using the ByDesign studio (SDK)
- …
User Interface
Last but not least the user interface evolved as well, of course.
To give you a good overview of the changes users will recognize immediately when they sign on to a feature pack 3.5 system for the first time, I recorded a short “Unboxing” video available on YouTube.
Let me mention just 3 small new features that I didn’t cover in this video yet:
- Define documents as favorites for fast access
- Flag documents to follow-up on them later
- Assign tags to documents
Do you have questions about a particular feature and want to hear more about it? Let me know!
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