Service Pack 3 for FRx 6.7 is available

Just released in the last week or two is Service Pack 3 for FRx 6.7. I first had a chance to see this in action last week at Convergence 2005 and then had my first install of it this week for a client.

Here are the two new items that stand out for me:

1 - Built in report wizard. You'll see a new "magic wand" icon on the main tool bar. This brings up a totally new window for the report wizard. It takes you thru about 7 different steps that are required to build your report. It even has a small thumbnail preview image of the report that changes dynamically as you complete each step. Very nice looking and its so easy, even *I* could create a financial statement. :)

2 - You no longer get a login box if you are using NT authentication. Whenever I implement FRx, i always setup 2 ODBC sources - one for Great Plains using SQL authentication and a 2nd one for FRx using NT authentication. This makes it easier for the users to login to FRx. To facilitate this I can create a network security group called "FRx Users" and then add this group in as a user account in SQL Enterprise Manager. So in the future if someone needs access to FRx, they just need to add them into the NT security group, rather than having to go into SQL. But even though FRx was authenticating the user based on their NT credentials, they still saw a login box when getting into FRx and just had to click "Ok" without entering any password. But now with FRx 6.7 and SP3, you will not get a login box at all if your NT credentials are valid. Very smooth and simple for the users. As a test, i switched my FRx ODBC source to use SQL authentication and then i WAS prompted for my SQL username and password to get in.

It's nice to see FRx finally getting a little attention from the dev team. I'm thinking that since FRx 6.7 now requires the .Net Framework 1.1 that we'll continue to see some nice new enhancements in the pipeline. One rumor i heard is that in the next major release, FRx will no longer store its data in .mdb files but rather in SQL. That would be excellent. I don't know if this means that the shared Sysdata folder would go away completely or just parts of it. Anything would be an improvement.

MBS Customers and Partners can download FRx 6.7 SP3 right here.