Sage News and Discussion

From my RSM: Hi I know the news from Sage has not been that good recently but I wanted to share with you a document, Deborah Nelson, our Sage 100 Product Manager has put together on enhancements coming in the Sage 100 2015 version. In my discussions with her last week- Control Release will be in late February early March and General Release will be after April. If you did not think Sage was making any investments in the product you may find this list interesting. It is not official to be shared with customers, but it does give you a good idea of some improvements across the board which will be in this product. I thought this might spread a little holiday cheer! Cheers

This same list was given out at the Sage Inspire tour last week. So much for not official...the end users that attended have it too.

@MoiraGoggin - great minds...

If they are releasing this in the Sage Inspire Tour, why would this not be official and to be shared with customers?

Thanks for posting this, @ThereseLogeais . Based on what @MoiraGoggin is saying, can be publish this for our users?

The version that came from the Inspire Tour is certainly open source. I would add ""tentative"" or ""planned"" descriptor to the list name.

I'm checking with my RSM for an answer.

@BrianRice it would seem unfair to withhold this information from end users that didn't attend the Inspire tour. It say go ahead and agree with @JerryNorman to preface with 'tenative/planned'

Well golleee - that's mighty big of them to schedule the release for April -- by my math they have come very close to skipping an entire release/upgrade cycle. And the information on this starts being released first to end users at the Inspire tour? Really? No whitepaper, nothing official on planned features? Except for the fact that a large majority of us are stuck with existing customer bases I expect to see a pretty good sized scale down of existing partners looking to do much additional business with Sage. Scary.

Her response: No it was not distributed at the Inspire Tour - as I just was at one last week and there were no handouts. You can talk about it. Plus this release is 4 plus months away . The purpose of my email was to help you as a partner to be educated and prepared about what is coming. But understand this is not am approved Customer Facing Sage document. So I would prefer if you do not send it out.

Too late - btw someone already posted the exact document and they received it at Inspire.

https://90minds-com.socialcast.com/messages/22763111

I knew it looked familiar!!

@ThereseLogeais I suggest you send your RSM the scanned/marked up copy and reference the Inspire session it came from. I suspect that it was one of the 1st ones, before somebody at Sage realized that it shouldn't get out.

Oh well..we are live with it. It's public if they distributed it at an open session - which I believe the prior post indicates they did.

@WayneSchulz I'm with you. I really, really cannot get my head into Irvine's thinking on this, even given UK's limitations. The behavior of Sage since Summit (if not before) has pretty much guaranteed that 100 and 300 partners have to look elsewhere for a competitive package. Even in their most recent Channel New letter, they underline success everywhere but in new customer acquisition: ""...Driving our performance for the year was continued high adoption levels of premium support, the growth of Sage ERP X3, and great success for our Sage Accountant Network offering. ""In FY15 we will continue to make doing business with Sage easier and increase focus on cross-sell growth and upsell opportunities with our support offerings."" WOW!

Confirmed. Ms. Deborah Nelson distributed this doc at the Road Ahead session on the Inspire tour. I was there.

Shiny new installation disk"" @WayneSchulz ??? Funny!!

I find that a large percent of the inside sales people at Sage rarely have a clue what's happening in the field or even with their product line.

Looks like they added a few more since the list was first published back in September..... https://90minds-com.socialcast.com/messages/21813202 Glad to see that they are continuing to add value to this release,. Maybe this is the reason for the longer roll out. They want to make this the BEST ever.........

Not only did that document get released at the Inspire event, @LisaDion and I had about a two hour conversation with Deborah at the venue after everyone else had left. Based on that, she appears to be the only one at Sage who seems to care about the customers, and therefore, the channel. Nothing earth shattering to report, but it was a great conversation. I imagine she won't be there long. She'll either get too frustrated or someone will discover she cares.

Reminds of the kiddy arcade game where the gopher pops out of his hole and you wackem.....

Moments ago via LInkedIn: Thanks for sharing Wayne! I am happy to confirm that everything listed in this document shared with attendees of the Sage 100 ERP Product session at the Sage Inspire Tour (sageinspiretour.com) is in fact in the 2015 release, which is complete and going through extensive internal testing at this time. So people can start thinking about it now and over the holidays, an email announcing the kickoff for the Sage 100 ERP 2015 release and the VIP Early Adopter Program will be sent out to partners and certified consultants shortly after the New Year. It will announce the actual date in mid-January for a webcast to kickoff the release and the VIP Early Adopter Program for 2015. That is when we will release the formal Sage Branded materials for the 2015 release. The VIP Early Adopter Program will run from February through May and the 2015 release will be generally available in early April. Please let me know if you have any questions. Deborah Nelson Product Manager, Sage 100 ERP Sage North America Office: 949.790.2081 | Cell: 949-342-0988 Deborah.Nelson@sage.com | http://www.sage.com 6561 Irvine Center Drive | Irvine | CA | 92618 | USA https://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=1644357&type=member&item=5951063766442528771&trk=groups_most_recent-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmr_1644357

Extensive"" internal testing?????

I looked at the 'enhancements' for 2015. First, something that they count 7 times (like allowing you to sort by a certain column in 7 different screens) is repeated over and over so as to make the list look long. This is just making the software work like all other basic software works and how other existing screens work. There really isn't much here. Probably $150k to $300k worth of development at most and they receive $60,000,000+/ year in maintenance. I'm on the wrong business..

I guess 99.5% gross margin on maintenance isn't enough. They still need to take more from us and from clients via price increases

My RSM's response: Wayne Schultz posted this on his blog so go ahead and share.

Way to go, @WayneSchulz - impacting Sage's communication strategies.

Actually Wayne posted this on OUR blog :)