A few weeks ago while traveling I made a quick, one-day stop in Dexter, MI, to visit former colleagues 
at Thomson Creative Solutions. While no longer "home" the Ann Arbor area holds many fond memories and the buildings on the Dexter campus house many old friends. I was greeted at the door by Teresa Mackintosh, VP of Marketing and we were soon joined in the Executive Conference room by Jack LaRue, SVP - CS Professional Suite, Dave Pollack, VP of Sales, Brian Vroom, VP of Development, Director of development, Frank Swierz, and, much to my later delight, Mark Powell, Development Manager for the Practice CS product.
While our conversation covered history, some ancient (when I served as VP of Product Strategy there) and some more recent, we quickly gravitated to current events --- who bought whom, why, who would be next, how the "competitive landscape" was shaping up, and what products and services would next be "in the news". But the main purpose of my trip was to take an in-depth look at the current iteration of Practice CS. Enter Mark Powell, a CPA and 20+ year veteran of the "practice management wars". Mark came to Thomson via their UniLink acquisition and was soon given the task of designing and building the next generation of practice management software. Several years, a lot of Diet Coke, and a ton of code later Mark is justifiably proud of his baby -- Practice CS.
Because Practice CS is so tightly integrated with Microsoft’s ubiquitous Outlook my first question of Mark was whether it [Practice CS] was an Outlook “add-in”. Technically, he assured me, the inverse is true --- his product looks into Outlook, not the other way around. The relatively new product (soft launched just last year) is based on Microsoft’s .NET technology and includes a “portlet” and “dashboard” concept. The system provides three dashboards --- or views --- Staff, Client, and Firm. Each view can be highly customized by including or excluding specific portlets and ordering and sizing the selected ones. The .NET technology also provides familiar browser style navigation. This is a welcome feature and one not often found in desktop applications. Playing with the “Client” view quickly revealed that I’d be able to see everything I’d need relative to a specific client --- all on one screen. There are portlets available for WIP, AR, email, documents, and tasks – and I get to see my general email and calendar, too. In a real piece of “secret sauce” the section housing the documents allows me to click and launch each in their native application such as Word, Excel, UltraTax [or another tax compliance product so desired --- I asked! (smile)]. The Firm and Staff views each use the same concept but populate their screens with portlets specific to those particular classes. Switching from one view to another is a single mouse click.
The product offers a very robust “In/Out Board”, multiple levels of security, and drill-down to the detail level whenever detail exists. The report library appeared, at first blush, a bit sparse --- but upon further investigation it’s apparent that the sort and filter feature would provide virtually every report that any partner in any firm might desire. And formatted just the way they’d want it, too.
Oh, I almost forgot --- it does time and billing, too!
gll
