Sage News and Discussion

Have a prospective existing user of MAS. They are on v4.3. Bought Business Alerts two or three years ago. Never implemented it. Now they're thinking it would be nice to use -- and I'm recommending if they're going to develop a lot of alerts they should just bite the bullet and go with Knowledgesync since the major cost to them is probably time spent maintaining, learning and designing. Thoughts on this advice? I also said if someone were to recommend to use BA that I think they'd be right as well -- that this is just my hunch that BA will ultimately get tossed at some point.

Well, Dawn certainly likes BA. At one time, wasn't there a trade in program to migrate BA users to KS?

I agree Wayne, there is so much functionality crossover between the two products it seems logical that BA will be on the way out at some point.

Given that Starship, F9, (and probably others) all got the boot -- I'm not sure why Sage would keep around two knowledge reporting tools unless BA was still under contract and too expensive to cancel. While I hate to tell someone to throw away something they own -- at the same time the writing is become easier and easier to read on some of these.

While there is a lot of functionality cross over, the big seller for KS is ease of use.

Is there anything they want to do that Business Alerts won't do? I have always preferred BA because it is not tied to a particular Crystal runtime (unless KS has fixed that?). Being Endorsed is often a matter of who was willing to give Sage a bigger percentage of the revenue.

What issue do you have with the Crystal run time?

When I was first evaluating both several years ago, KS installed a particular version Crystal runtime which was often not the same version as the one MAS uses, and mixed Crystal versions can cause all sorts of grief.

Interesting. This doesn't seem to be an issue for us for some reason. Wonder why?

The newer versions of KS will have a lot of very cool features such as the ability to send out text messages to phones as well as do dashboards.

Cool news, @LouisAraiza. Is their interface still the Windows client or have they updated that?

As far as I know. At the last sessin on Friday when I gave my talk the two ladies before me praised KS greatly. They acted as if they could not run their business without it.

@JeffSchwenk -- When I started using KS it was very difficult to use, but I pushed myself to use it more and now I see the light.

There you go. It just takes a little longer for certain people to drink the Kool-Ade. Reminds me of the good ol days of DOS. I was the last to switch to Windows!

If you build a lot of alerts I find that KS is much easier to use. Copying or using existing settings is much easier from what I have seen.

Well one thing I do really like is that the query and the event are separate, so you can re-use the same query. And, I like that you can have multiple subscribers on the same alert (picked from a list versus typing in email addresses). Actually, there are several features I like. :)