Dear Reader,
Welcome to the fourteenth issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.
Acumatica Summit 2016
At the beginning of the month I went down to Florida for Acumatica Summit 2016. This was my first software conference and I made a lot of rookie mistakes like:
Going into the week sleep deprived
Expecting to run into people (there were over 600) instead of making arrangements ahead of time with specific people that I wanted to meet
Next year will be on my home turf of Southern California and I plan to apply what I learned this year so I can make the experience next year even more profitable. That being said, this year was still a great experience and it made me even more optimistic about not only the Acumatica product, but the Acumatica ecosystem as a whole.
I wrote up some more of my impressions on the blog which you can checkout if you click here.
Acumatica 6.0 and Power BI
My favorite overall thing about Summit was meeting people, but my favorite product thing was the demo of Power BI in Acumatica 6.0.
In Acumatica 6.0, you will be able to embed Power BI tiles directly into Acumatica dashboards. That’s huge because it delivers the “feel” of Power BI being inside the Acumatica product which is critical for many users. I can’t wait to get my hands on a build of Acumatica 6.0.
We will also get pivot tables in Acumatica 6.0 which I think will be a big deal because you will basically be able to add drill down to Generic Inquiry screens.
Here are some pictures that I took of the screen onstage during the 6.0 demo at Summit: click here, click here, click here, and click here.
One More Thing
I discovered a potentially cool use for Power BI this month. Power BI can read from Exchange which means I can use my Outlook calendar as my timesheet during the week and then have Power BI create my timesheet at the end of the week so I can put it into Acumatica. Of course, I can get my historical timesheet data with OData from Acumatica so the Exchange/OData combination gives me a nice backwards/forwards view of things.
I’m still experimenting with it in real life. If it goes well, I hope to write some blog posts on it.
Until Next Month…
Thanks for reading. And check your inbox for another newsletter issue on Thursday, March 31st.
Sincerely,
Tim Rodman