Intuit Finally Offers Some Support For Linux

walterbyrd sends us to the ZDNet blog, where Dan Farber & Larry Dignan write: "Intuit said Wednesday it will allow QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions to operate on Linux servers. For Intuit, the move is a bit of a milestone — QuickBooks is the first of its products [to] work on open source software."

Comments

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[BlakeReid]

If a Linux Quickbooks client ever surfaces, prepare to wait for version parity. We just tried to switch our accountant over to the Mac version of QB 2007 from Windows 2006 and within a couple of days he had a page-long list of missing features and deal-breaking bugs. Thank the lord for Parallels.

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[LWATCDR]

This is Quickbooks Enterprise not Quickbooks and yes it does matter.
The company I work uses SAGE for it's accounting but we us Linux for our servers... Except for the one that runs the accounting.
This product is for medium size businesses not small business. So yea it is a big deal.
I think a Linux version of Quicken would be great Dell could sell it. A Linux version of Quickbooks would also be nice for small companies. But for Quickbooks Enterprise the server side is the logical first move. Lots of medium sized companies would like to use Linux servers but are still using Windows Desktops. Thank you SAMBA.

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[einhverfr]

We, on the LedgerSMB project are working really hard at addressing this need. For the average small business owner, it is not to the point where the software is easy to install and set up, and it still requires some hand holding. But within 1-2 years, I expect we will have an open source competitor to Quickbooks and Peachtree which will handle every business well from zero to several hundred employees.

Right now, the software is suitable to those who really want an open source solution, but once we get to 2.0... Come join our community and help make this happen. :-)

Re:It's the client, not the server we need

[einhverfr]

Agreed on your points. However, when you say "Sage" I am sure that is as descriptive as saying "some program made by Intuit." I assume you mean Sage 500?

However, there is no reason why one cannot have a darned good accounting engine which could work for both small and large businesses (perhaps with alternate user interfaces). The major obstacles to such a solution have been the willingness to depend on proprietary database technologies which add a huge cost barrier to small businesses. There is no reason why this has to continue.

One of the major focuses of LedgerSMB has been the development of such an engine and the ability to have alternate user interfaces. We are not to this goal yet, but we do have an accounting solution that is likely to be of interest to the open source community and will shortly be a viable competitor to Sage 500 and MS Dynamics/Great Plains. I have actually been involved in one migration from Dynamics and am involved in one from Sage 500 at the moment.

At the same time, as we head towards 2.0, we expect to be able to make the user interface far more suitable for smaller businesses. I hope that within two years, we have a program that can compete extremely favorably with everything from Quickbooks Basic to Sage 500. That is a tall order, I know, but we have a roadmap to get there.

People who are interested in this are certainly welcome to join our community and help make this happen.

Forget the Linux support, Intuit needs actual

[einhverfr]

presales customer service.

I have a customer who is trying desperately to move all servers away from Windows (they currently run Sage 500), so I called up Quickbooks (the number the sales report said to call) for information as to when Linux server support would be available. They refused to answer any questions unless I had a support account. I suppose they are not interested in getting migrations to happen.

I suppose I cannot recommend such a product to my customer.