Some shots from yesterday's events. Food was MUCH better than at Summit. Free beer and wine afterwards. DC traffic on the Maryland side was brutal.
Probably had over 120 attendees (might be a little high). Sage employees numbered over 20. Mardi Gras themed since Summit 2015 is in the Big Easy. Very end user centric. The PDF is a copy of the conference guide. Ed Kless was the emcee. All break out sessions were of mobile offerings, cloud solutions, SPS and the road ahead (short term) of various products. Door prizes were awarded to those who stayed till the end (nice ones at that). Only end users were eligible to win. Beads were given through out the day to folks who asked questions. You received one raffle ticket for each strand that you turned in. Resellers were given a passport which the sponsors initialed. Four resellers turned in a completed which were used for the reseller door prize won by yours truly (better luck next time Larry and Ty). In my excitement of hearing my name called out by Ed, I forget what it was but I think it was a $100 statement credit to be used when I sold a new license deal....... Just jk'g.
Sophie Leguillette, marketing VP (from France) gave the keynote. She stated that Sage wants ""to be recognized as the most valuable support of small to medium businesses by creating a greater freedom for them to succeed"". Not sure if it was her quiet voice, her French accent or my deafness but she was difficult to follow. Doubt if they will add subtitles by tomorrow.
Quote from Rob Lawson and Bill Levesque during the CRM presentation - ""Technology doesn't solve problems, it enables a solution"".
Takeaway from the Sage HRMS session on the ACA - Sage has rolled out a cloud based solution for ACA reporting (or at least for determining compliance) the uses the Sage HRMS data tables. They expect to roll out this same solution to the 100's and 300's of the Sage world sometime in the first quarter 2015. Pricing is $399 plus 100 M & S. Not priced by the employee. Jennifer Dungan (
Jennifer.dungan@sage.com) - 727-826-7610 is heading up the project. Feel free to contact her. I expressed my frustration that Sage is doing a poor job of communicating this benefit to ALL Sage PR users.......
Interesting that they had a placard up for SageU and Sage City, but I never saw a Sage employee manning the table. I actually had questions for that person!
Linda Cade was holding down the fort for Sage 500. I asked her if she felt like the Maytag repair guy. She mentioned that Erika was having lots of fun at her new employer...
Jeremy Ploessel (sp?) gave the afternoon general session on Sage Business Care, SageU, Sage City and the Sage Support KB. Mentioned that 30% of Sage users are self taught. Big emphasis to end users about the knowledge available on line.
Angie Kontenakos presented SPS. Indicated that they are giving exemptions to companies if they have a good business reason (bank requirement, etc) for not using SPS. They have agreements with five other processors to act as a portal to pass information to the five merchant processors. But there is a fee for this...
Deborah Nelson gave the Sage 100 v2015 overview. Main highlights are changes to purchase order history (using SO history as the model). AP vendor name field is being expanded to 50 characters (optional in setup). Enabling some interesting color coding on the panels (e.g. changing color by company on ONLY the panel frame, color coding FIELDS for required information, etc). Not a LOT of changes otherwise.