Sage News and Discussion

Curious to know: what are you and your customers using in place of FRx? BizInsight, SMI, or something else?

Still using FRx as long as they can. Many hope or suspect they will either be retired, be laidoff, or moved to another job so the problem becomes someone else's and they won't have to deal with it.

Almost all using FRx still. Starting to get new customers using SMI.

Almost all on FRX (same as Harold and Dawn). Depending on group experiences I would go SMI but if someone asks today I recommend BizNet because I hear multiple people keep saying it's easier for the customer and seems a lot more user friendly to create reports.

It's a split with our clients. Some want to continue with FRx as long as possible but we have several clients that have moved or are moving to Biznet and that includes some clients that attempted to use SMI. We do not recommend SMI to any of our clients at this time. We have not had any dissatisfaction among the clients that are using Biznet.

Pam what is your process for providing the recommendation to customers? I am concerned that Sage will pull a ""full court press"" and try to tilt people toward SMI while painting the ""free factor"" and instilling doubt in our customer minds about why a partner would ""recommend a paid solution over something Sage gives them"" .... Crazy assed idea of the day -- would a branded 90Minds whitepaper on pros/cons help. Not that we individually could not create and brand such a document -- but that by putting the 90 Minds logo on it we might throw off some individual heat that Sage could try to apply to each firm. In other words Sage would have a harder time retaliating against a group whitepaper than one that is self branded and may recommend against a Sage product? Thought?

There an update to SMI in the pipeline, which is planned to released at Summitt. I've been told that performace has been inscreased and the user interface to create reports has been improved. I might be seeing a beta version next week. A ""new and imporved"" marketing campaign from Sage may be around the cornor.

We have a small handful that are still using FRx (of that small group, all are very proficient) but any customer that has replaced FRx, replaced Sage 100 Financials, or purchased new is using BizInsight. The users we work with have found the free SMI Report Manager license insufficient (some even offended that it isn't a complete solution) and needing to add the Connector or other pieces means spending money that could be put towards BizInsight which is easier to use. This makes combating the free argument relatively easy, @WayneSchulz and is another opportunity for us to position ourselves, not as shills for Sage but as someone with the customers best interest in mind. With all that, we don't have a single customer using SMI.

I rather suspect that a couple of my FRx users will not upgrade past the point where FRx doesn't work anymore except at gunpoint, and so far I have found SMI to be a very UNfriendly system.

We are very honest with our clients about why we don't suggest that they move to SMI. It is not user friendly at all, when intitially released trying to recreate a client FRx report in SMI was not pretty, and we do not feel that it's a good product or good replacement for FRx. We have had a couple of clients that insisted on SMI, paid for services, and then came back to say we were right and they are switching to Biznet. We had one situation where a client has thousands of GL account numbers and SMI would take hours and hours to generate, we could not get anywhere with support, they ended up having us try and work with someone is South Africa and all parties involved said enough is enough. Ultimately, it's the clients choice but they have all been impressed with the ease of use and the transition from FRx to Biznet.

All of our clients are still on FRx. We recently signed uo with Biznet after trying to work with SMI. Any new proposals will include Biznet as an option.

Any objections if I remove everyone's names and create a blog post out of this. Simple Q&A type post: "" Ask 90 Minds: SMI vs BizNet - What Do You Recommend"" Remove ALL names - just paste in comments - probably in quotes. Completely anonymous but I think valuable to users.

OK with me

I can't tell you how many times I have tried SMI. I've even had a one on one ""counseling"" with Eric and I still didn't get my head wrapped around it. I have one client trying on her own. She has attended many of the Anytime Learning sessions and she is dead in the water. I have another that bought the extra components going no where fast and a third that I am waiting until we get their installation finished before I bring in Biznet (for simplicity?). SMI seems to be a module where you have to forget everything ever learned about FRx and start with a blank slate (and mind). Throw in a LOT of patience for learning the new way. Speed was an issue and may still be. One could make a killing if they had a source for black market FRx registration keys.

No objections here.

We did have one instance in which we installed SMI but the users couldn't make it work. Obviously different users display different skills but that user is now working with BizInsight and there aren't any problems to speak of.

...and no objection from publishing this if the names and avatars are redacted.

We have 1 using Biz and one using SMI. Most still on FRx, but plan to get people up to speed on SMI because customers will expect it to work.

Wayne, the blog post would be very useful.