General Consultant Discussion

Decent overview video of Sage Advisor process to auto update your Sage Non-Profit SW. This is probably similar to what Sage 100 ERP goes through (except for path and the actual upgrade steps). Does this really seem like a big feature? To me it's more than a one click upgrade and I think many customers would balk at the steps after the download is placed automatically onto their desktop. http://vimeo.com/67230149

They could have actually made it substantially simpler. To have to go in, then manually check again, then manually find the downloaded file, then ignore some zip file, all that stuff should have been automatic. Then it does the upgrade on first open and it says it can take hours. So a clueless end user does't open the company until the start of business the next morning and all of a sudden the whole office is twiddling its thumbs for hours waiting for the data conversion. And of course this assumes, no crashes during conversion and no problems. You look at MAS, you have the server components, ODBC components, workstation components, crystal reports, SMI, paperless office, other 3rd party stuff, you have workstation setups, the usual windows security rights issues with all this and we haven't even begun to talk about the problems with customizations, etc. About the only saving grace MAS has is that since it's in the 'milk the maintenance' mode, you are very unlikely to see any schema changes so it won't break pre-existing reports anymore.

My sense is that Sage had bigger plans for this auto-update but someone internally woke up to the realities that you mention.