William, you need to come and work out here in the real world for a while.
When developing a sale (Opportunity) we go through many developmental steps
that entail lots of email communication, tasks and many other items that
pertain to the sale (contract). Once the sale is consumated all of those
pieces of communication carry into the project that ensues. Our projects may
take a year or more to develop into the order being issued. During that time
many items of great importance have been decided. However, we may not get the
order so it remains an opportunity forever and never become a project. If I
put it initally into a project, I have cluttered up my project folder. The
way you have it an Opportunity is nothing more than a quote that then becomes
a sales order or invoice. For companies selling "things" this may be fine but
then, most of them don't have projects just "things". For a contractor like
us, and almost anyone that develops design build projects the paper flow goes
like this:
1. Initial contact made with design and development work done hopefully
headed toward a contract.
2. Contract awarded, all previous communication rolled over into the project
file.
3. Contract completed and paid, after one year warranty period, contract
closed.
So I dissagree with you, an Opportunity and a Project are directly related
and BCM should allow for direct conversion. BCM has no other instrument with
which to differentiate the phases of a project.
At this point you are telling me that I will have to manually move all
communication from an Opportunity to a Project which is unnecessary work.
Microsoft should make an Opportunity convertable direct to a Project.
Tieing this back to my opening statement, increasingly I am noticing a
disconnect between MS design staff and how, at least, I use the software. I
am converting away from Office Accounting precicely because there are some
very basic functions of accounting, partiularly project accounting, that it
can't do and even after MANY comments on the discussion groups the Beta9
comes out with these items not fixed yet a bunch of new bells and whistles.
Too bad because I have tried to keep my business software all MS. but I jsut
can't work with software that can't deliver even basic features properly.
Jim
