General Consultant Discussion

Looks like Office 365 Integration with Sage 100 v. 2018 will require Sage has a MS Delegate Administrator account on the customer's Office 365 license. Confirmed during a presentation today with Sage Roundtable.

I missed the first couple minutes of the roundtable. Will there be a video made available?

@MoiraGoggin the Acumatica integration with Office 365 works similarly. You create an admin account in Office365 which is granted delegation rights to all accounts that you want to use in Acumatica. If not established, Acumatica can't send an email on their behalf. Just thought I would share the parallel.

I looked at Acumatica yesterday, and didn't realize that they were using a similar model. That still seems odd to me full access to a customer's O365 license? So that includes non ERP users, billing info., passwords, support, it's a lot of access.

If you want the Acumatica admin user to be able to 1) read, send, and move, emails, 2) create, move, and adjust contacts, 3) create, move, and adjust appointments, and 4) create, move, and adjust tasks within Office 365 for a particular user, the admin user must have the necessary rights to do so.

I wonder if I am the only one **completely** in the dark with Office 365. If there are others, this would be a good topic for a future webinar. Office 365 for Sage Dummies - A primer! I only have a couple clients on it so I just let their IT department do their thing.

My concern, like all other ""free"" integrations, once I touch something I'm deemed by the customer to be responsible for implementing it fully (including any required debugging). And increasingly I feel Sage pushes back the support to the partner. If the customer engages ($) for implementation I'm fine. The trouble is most don't feel they should pay extra to get what they see as a free integration to work. (See also: Sage CRM, Sage Intelligence, etc).

@JeffSchwenk I use Office 365, but compared to what I had previously loaded on my computer, it will not leave me alone, i.e. it's invasive. It's really not functionally any different from the previous versions, but Microsoft saves millions by deploying and licensing it like this. Most users bought computers with Office loaded and didn't upgrade while they had that computer, and Microsoft hated that, because they didn't make the money they thought they deserved. I consider Office 365 to be one of those necessary evils.

There are other ways to integrate to O365 by the looks of it. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/connect-your-app-to-o365-app-launcher

@JohnHoyt - O365 has some benefits baked in as a cloud product. You can access it anywhere from any device. You don't need to have an IT department or consulting group set it up and manage it and make sure it is available remotely. You can share documents easily - no more stuff saved on someone's local machine and getting lost or inconvenient to access. You can collaborate on documents at the same time. You can easily add or remove licenses (usually). There are a few more core benefits to it. And yes, some of those things were available previously but it would require IT setup and management time. It's many of the same reason people are moving to cloud software over all. I agree that it is a massive money maker for Microsoft but, unsurprisingly, people are happily signing up and handing them money because of the value they are seeing in return. It reinforces a core belief of mine that people don't want to jerk around with consultants. They just want to turn on their computers and do their jobs. As much as we think we are needed, customers would replace us all with a website if they could.

I think customers would replace the license buying process with a website if they could. And that's probably going to happen not only for Sage but for most online software/services. What the customers still pay for is value in the form of advice for their specific industry. As an example, one of my customers asked for advice on how to properly manage the credit card workflow from when the card is charged to how the amount ultimately goes into the correct bank account. So happens I have relevant recent experience on how to do this having just gone through it and can advise one way is to create a report to pull the charges off the invoices, export to Excel, tidy up and then import to AR Cash Receipts (yes there are other ways). Depending on my relationship with that customer (access level) I might provide everything as part of the plan or as a separately price project. Point being is that I have relevant info to share that the customer is more than willing to pay for. Where things start to fall down and the customer isn't as willing to pay is when their industry is one where I can't tell them stories of how I've solved their very problem for 5 other companies just like theirs. Need an ecommerce system? WMS? Shipping? Let me tell you how I just installed PDQ for [ insert type of company ]. { insert sound of cash register } On the flip side - where things tend to go south (ie - can't make money) is when someone in an industry where Sage 100 is not strong where I have little or no relevant experience wants advice. Those are just dead ends in my experience (yes we all get lucky once or twice but generally speaking no). TL;DR: Customers pay for advice that solves their problem and we will make the most money pursuing and specializing in industries where Sage 100 is a home run and has thousands of similar users. For the most part that is wholesale distribution 10+ user growing companies.

So, what's my point with respect to O365. I feel I would need to do more than just be the paper shuffler to sell the customer a license. In order to be successful, I'd need to tell stories of how x of my customers use O365 in a specific way to solve a specific pain that my customer is also experiencing.

One of you clients will have to be the pioneer eventually.