First Look: Oracle Small Business Suite Version 7.6

Wayne N. Kawamoto
Managing Editor, www.smallbusinesscomputing.com

Oracle Corp., a provider of software for e-business, announced the release of Oracle Small Business Suite version 7.6, powered by NetLedger. According to the company, new features and enhancements have been made in all components of the Oracle Small Business Suite, including sales force automation, customer support management, web store and order management, and accounting and payroll. These latest new features and enhancements were based on user surveys, and focus on adding functionality and making the Suite easier to use.

Key to this new release is the addition of Custom Records, which lets a business use the Suite to maintain a database of information that’s unique to their operation. For example, a property management company could create a database of all of their properties with fields representing all of the information it needs to maintain about the property such as number of units, size of the units, maintenance schedule, etc. The custom records feature is integrated with the core business information in a company such as its customer and product lists.

To help businesses that market and sell through partners, a new partner center has been added to the existing customer and vendor centers. Businesses can now provide secure online access to their partners to log in and make changes to their profile, create additional codes to track promotions, and retrieve information about the partnership activity including information on sales.

Additionally, Many usability features have been added. The Oracle Small Business Suite has a newly designed Home page that offers enhanced customization capabilities and a new search capability to help companies find records quickly. Another ease-of-use feature is the new mass update capability, which lets users change multiple records all at once based on the results of a search, simplifying many common business processes, such as reassigning leads or changing lead status from active to inactive.

For more information, please visit the company’s Web site at www.oraclesmallbusiness.com. Also, read our recent review.