Sage 100

Got a client running MAS 200 v4.05 (!) 55 users. They do approx. 15000 sales orders (few line items) per month. They have approx. 10000 inventory items. They need to upgrade and like the functionality of MAS 200, but are concerned about its stability since they're planning on growing to ~75 users in the next few years. They're prepared to replace their IT infrastructure regardless of their ERP direction. Any experience out there with MAS 200 in this size environment? Would MAS 500 be a better fit? Any other input?

We have a customer with 100 users and approximately 2000 invoices per DAY. They use a virtualized environment and the server has a lot of RAM. Well they do have multiple servers. MAS 200 is on its own dedicated ""server"". They also have a SQL box for data warehousing.

Thanks Dawn. Other than being on a dedicated server with lots of RAM, any other specifics about the environment? I'm assuming it's reasonably stable and performs well?

I have one or two at the 20-ish user level. The biggest problems are on MAS200 with phantom users -- running it as an application vs service seems to cure most ills. Then next biggest issue is concurrency. No matter how you slice it when you get to the 50+ concurrent level there's some amount of banging into each other. Not to mention speed of reporting -- which can be somewhat mitigated with tools. I would say of the larger companies I've seen most justify Sage by pointing to how much Oracle etc would cost per year. At the higher user level I start to be very open and honest about potential issues so if problems arise I'm not seen as ""promising it would work"".

I had 2-3 at that level and there were some concurrency and speed issues, and upgrades tended to be a bear. However, the customers were all smart enough to realize that MAS met their functional needs real well and that moving to a larger system might just bring larger problems. So they continued to complain about MAS, but refused to leave.

Any opinions about whether MAS 200 or MAS 200 SQL is a better option at this size?

I am shying away from SQL only because I believe that most IT folks assume that it will be faster and writeable (both false under typical circumstances). When it's an IT requirement I will give a 15 to 30 minute speech and written documentation so as not to become the unpaid Sage complaint department.

Great input. Thanks.

We have a customer with 75 concurrent users in our hosted environment. We run 5 separate access servers for them to reduce the potential for workstation lockup. We put the backend on a reboot schedule to avoid phantom sessions. We had a larger one in the past and had an issue with file sizes in history files but that was in the 3.x days.

Running it in the Citrix environment puts all the network traffic in a very controlled environment. That can also be an issue if using a traditional WAN/LAN environment with large user counts.

We would likely have one MAS200 Server, one Domain Controller, and two Terminal Servers for load splitting. Most users would connect to MAS200 via one of the terminal servers. All servers will be brand new, 64 bit, with tons of RAM. I'm hoping with this environment, we can get decent performance.

You can put more than one client on the terminal servers as well (different directories). If two people log in simultaneously it can cause issues.

Yes - we've tried that before, but we had issues (probably like you mention). I'm inclined to not go that way. $$$ aren't the issue as much as performance. We can dictate how many terminal servers they get, so I'm considering suggesting even more than two.

you can virtualize and have multiple servers on a single machine. CPU is not the issue, memory is.