Sage 100

Ebusiness heads up in case you have Sage still hosting anyone. They are sending out emails to the 80 or so customers they currently host for eBusiness, notifying them that they are ending this as of 1/31/2011. They have made arrangements with another company (Hostway) who is offering to do the hosting for same price ($500/yr I believe) with a pretty simple switchover. Hostways configuration for this was actually done by Ronnie Asp at Sage. I must have missed the announcement from Sage, as I found out from a customer who forwarded the Sage email to me. Like Extended Solutions, Sage is continuing to rid itself of unprofitable pieces.

It's the Sage way ... let the VAR be the local unpaid complaint department. Nice that they didn't end it on 12/31 ... and gave a little notice....

True. But if you look at it, the breadth of MAS90/200 has actually shrunk over the years, not grown. For all intents and purposes Manufacturing beyond BOM assembly is dead, job cost is dead, timekeeper is dead, time & billing is dead, ebusiness is dead, MAS90 is beginning to sound like SAP where the answer to every clients issue beyond QBE functionality is to use a 3rd party. Trust me, that is going to fail you against broad featured competitors.

MAS90 is an installed base play going forward. Realistic next step product for most VARS without a 100 person firm is going to be some type of SaaS offering. I don't see people like Wayne Schulz re-tooling to start taking on significantly bigger systems like an ERP X3 or MAS 500. In effect it's going to be a similar VAR model though the services will be related to interpreting data provided by SaaS. The era of debugging workstation setups is fast coming to a close.

eBusiness Web Services is the new wave.

Thanks for the heads-up.

glueing a 3rd party custom ecommerce front end to mas90 via development is not going to be a hit @DawnAnastasi . Especially since in most cases you need to maintain items, pictures, custom pricing, price breaks etc in 2 separate systems unless you have a very powerful and complex integration. Credit card pre-auth passthrough alone is a PITA. @WayneSchulz You may be right, but these saas vendors can put your entire business under with the stroke of a pen because they, not you own the entire client and flow of cash.

One disadvantage of the e-Business module is because it was making calls to the system live, it was slow. However if you have a method to automate transfers of data up to the website, then you do not have the speed issue. I wouldn't ""maintain"" anything in two systems; make MAS 90 the master and push data to the website. Only pull down orders.

Yea but how many ecommerce applications have the exact same pricing model as MAS90? For BtoC this isn't an issue, but for BtoB, the ecommerce site needs to provide a customer the exact same price an order entry clerk would via a phone call. Ebiz is slow because MAS90 has a crappy database. Hopefully sql will eventually resolve that.

In Synch http://roi-consulting.com/in_synch/ROIFlyer_Final_.pdf

But theoretically you won't need insynch anymore with webservices. The issue is still the same, you need to custom build an integration to a third party ecommerce site and that site needs to have the full mas90 pricing engine embedded. In this case, its 2 additional ISV's. ROI and the ecommerce site plus a fair amount of consultant/developer 'glue.' When people buy epicor ecommerce, netsuite ecommerce, etc, it just 'works' with fully integrated touchpoints/common datasets where needed. @MikeFitzgerald Given you are the 'spokesperson for ROI' :) what other moving parts were involved in your client(s) for their successful ecommerce project?

The theory of no more insynch is pretty much BS. I had a relatively simple client who wanted to do some web integration. Brought in Angela at ISM for an initial conference and so far as I can tell there's still a decent amount of heavy lifting unless all you want your web site to say is ""hello world"". This is another technology that will go nowhere.

Web Services are not ready, yet. From what I understand only a few elements are available. Yes, ROI has to configure the mapping between MAS90 and your site based on your specs, but once it's in place ROI is virtually out of the picture. They've already integrated with most popular storefronts, so most of the time they do not need to reinvent the wheel. It works like eBusiness (without the approval process), as a MAS90 module. No other software is required. Most of our clients that use it never need to go to the storefront for day to day stuff. And, yes, In Synch will synchronize your current customer pricing or any other pricing currently in play in MAS90. It has all the same touchpoints as eBusiness and adds the freedom to use almost any hosted site XML , SQL, etc. You can create UDF fields to hold web specific fields. You can model these after eBusiness. True, epicor and netsuite 'just work,' provided you like their look and feel, and won't need additional functionality that's not available. Separating the two allows a client the freedom to pick (or change) a storefront that fits its needs without worrying about compatibility. For example, we have a specialized wine merchant that uses In Synch with Nexternal. Nexternal's stores specialize to the wine industry which has special rules about shipping and allows for wine clubs, etc. Another is an organic dog food manufacturer that sells retail and wholesale. They use websitepipline. Either way, any solution will require some work up front both in design and functionality. The value is in the ongoing maintenance and fulfillment of the store. If you're interested in the cost, the module is $4,995. They estimate that most jobs can be completed in 24 hours @$200/hr, so they include a fixed-fee $4,800 not-to-exceed budget. Any additional ad-hoc programming is additional. Annual Maintenance is $550.

We just did an upgrade with InSync and while I don't know the complexity of the web integration - the people at insync were easy to work with and very responsive. Insync seems the least intrusive. I go the impression that web services aren't ready as well. It seemed like the existing web developers - to use web services - have to learn and use additional Sage code/syntax. (red flag, red flag, red flag)...(in the Pre meeting the existing developers had a fit and didn't understand the sage documentation , ridiculed it, etc - sound familiar)... And these were web guys who allegedly handled the web for one of the local casinos here. Were the developers just bad eggs? Perhaps. But..... Ever try to convince a web site developer to use an additional programming language for their web integration? Hello finger pointing.... ( luckily this job never got started or with web services that's what I think would have happened ).

Insynch is absolutely the way to go still, we probably have a dozen or so clients using it. Pretty much out of the box and affordable for the average MAS customer. The 2 eBiz users we still have left are leftovers from an old era.

Well so much for 'theoretically.' :) Guess Bob is still safe for awhile. One general problem you run into the mas90 world, and it's not really Sage's fault, is the technical and budgetary mentality is a real problem. MAS90, for example, is actually 'too easy' to upgrade. We now have clients who have a fit when it takes more than 2 days to upgrade the system after 10 years for neglect. 90% of the alternative systems on the market take 2x to 5x the time and money to upgrade and thats what those clients are used to. But since mas90 is often the step up from QB, or mas90 clients talk to friends who are on QB, everybody thinks billing rates are too high and complexity is to high, but they don't notice the flexibility or feature set differences. Many MAS90 clients have a heart attack when you tell them an ecommerce project is $10k to $15k. In the NAV space, or any comparable system, ecommerce generally is $25k to $100k and folks pay. Same problem with real BI tools. Many MAS clients just expect everything to have about one less 0 in the price tag as stuff needs to cost relative to development and overhead costs

Good points on the cost -- and it's a big reason why I'm increasingly getting to a cost range before I even start the conversation (typically this is with new prospects as I've usually already provided info to existing clients).