Wednesday, May 31, 2006

The end of MSN Money Plus

The message below was posted on the MoneyCentral website - the additional help mentions something called the MSN Money Service, which appears to be some sort of replacement

An important change is coming to the MSN Money service. MSN Money Plus will be replaced by the MSN Money service, starting early in July. After the transition, much of the account information you currently have stored by MSN Money Plus will be available through the MSN Money service.


The message itself said:

After June 28, 2006, significant changes will be made to your access to data on this website

If you are an MSN Money Plus user: MSN Money Plus will be discontinued on June 28, 2006.

You will still be able to view your accounts and pay bills through MSN Bill Pay on http://moneycentral.msn.com, but your budget, spending, and bills to-do list will no longer be available. To track the information that you used to track in MSN Money Plus,
try a free 90-day trial of Microsoft Money Deluxe
Learn more

If you are a Microsoft Money user: All of your information will continue to be available on your local computer. On this website, you will still be able to view your accounts and pay bills through MSN Bill Pay. You will no longer be able to edit your account data or view your spending and budget data.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Brief foray into Atlas

I made a brief look at Atlas (http://atlas.asp.net) for the Money site earlier in the week. Actually, most of my use will be behind the scenes in administrating various parts of the site, rather than standard user use.

I did look at the Atlas Control Toolkit, specifically the TextBoxWatermark. As an experiment, I added it to the Contact Page, so it is a little more obvious what to type in where.

I don't know enough about the platforms it supports, but it does seem to work on Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (beta 2).

Over time, I will probably add more Atlas and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) things to the site. THis may be more obvious in places like the FAQ list, as the page is starting to get very long and unwieldy.

Welcome to the new MSN Money! - MSN Money

Updates were made to MSN Money in a number of regions yesterday. The updates include the following:
  • Message Boards
  • Improved Site Search
  • Redesigned Article Templates
  • RSS Feeds
  • New Weekend Edition
  • Quote Watchlist
  • More CNBC Video
Plus other stuff - finance tips, news, account tracking etc.

The full details can be found at Welcome to the new MSN Money! - MSN Money

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Turning off download of stock or fund prices for specific stocks or funds

A couple of people have asked me how to stop Microsoft Money downloading particular fund or stock price prices, without disabling all of them. This is especially pertinent, given the posting I made yesterday - MSN Money UK Fund Prices 100x too low.

So, I created a new article - Turning off download of stock or fund prices for specific stocks or funds [Microsoft (MS) Money FAQ and Help].

I've followed my own advise here and temporarily turned off downloaded prices for the funds that I have that are experiencing this problem.

Friday, May 12, 2006

MSN Money - UK fund prices 100x too low

I'm back after a nice long vacation. Always good to recharge the batteries and take time out.

I come back to a problem with the UK fund feed. It appears that prices are being downloaded into Microsoft Money with their values divided by 100.

From the information I have seen, in the limited time since I returned, it appears that Morningstar, who provide the feed for MSN Money are now providing prices in pounds, rather than pence as they did previously. I have not checked this to verify it though.

If this is true, then one of the following scenarios would need to take place - firstly, Microsoft would have to change the MSN Money feed to cope with this pricing change. Or, Microsoft would need to change the Microsoft Money software so that downloads do the conversion (don't expect this to happen for older versions of Microsoft Money though!), or Morningstar would need to change the feed back to how it was before, before they changed it (at least for the MSN Money site).

It is unclear whether Microsoft knew of this change before it happened. They do know about it now, as can be seen on the network status page (MSN Money - Network Status) - this page is mainly geared up for US users, but does have this fault on it. You can find links to other status pages via FAQ Article 254 on the Microsoft Money FAQ site.