Sage 100

Robert, Jim and I met with John Fronius, Matt Chin and Amy Dotson of Sage regarding their knowledgebase. While it remains to be seen ho much they can improve what they have - we carried a couple messages that we felt were important: a. Don't close the existing (no login) infosource knowledgebase without warning (and without transferring the important items) b. Create some non-gated (no login) areas for common technical items such a supported platforms so we can share these with IT and the documents are not stale by the time customers get around to implementing c. Enhance the search on the existing kb so you can actually find items I can't say I have a lot to report though Sage is very interested in working with the group and getting our feedback. We will see what changes come from our meetings. There's also a big push at Sage to develop Sage City into a community (ie Sagetalk, Besttalk). We asked Sage if it were possible to get an RSS feed of only new messages (not including replies) so we could pipe that into Socialcast. This makes it easier for us to monitor new messages without having to also see the back and forth message chatter. Sage is looking into this. If we hear more from Sage I'll update everyone.

Thanks. What was their input during the meeting? Your comment regarding Sage City is puzzling in that that is what I thought was the plan of attach all along. Did they bring anything new to the discussion table or was this a mirror image of the road ahead? It sounds like you did all the talking.

We kind of sucked much of the VAR life out of Sage City when we created 90 Minds. I think Sage would like to reinvigorate that community with our free labor. We told them we'd pipe in an RSS feed but only of new messages (Which we used to get but which some upgrade to Sage city removed - what we can get now is an RSS of all messages but that's very noisy - we only want NEW messages and not replies). We'd spoken to them before about the KB and our issues -- all of which we've discussed in SC - mainly poor search quality, a site that is down frequently, difficulty sharing articles with customers due to login requirements. This meeting was requested by John Fronius of Sage to share their plans going forward to ""Fix"" some of the issues. I'm not sure anything will come out of it but we were all together at lunch and it was good to make face to face contact.

Sorry, but I have stopped contributing for several reasons - 1) Tired of answering questions to problems that Sage should be fixing, 2) never taken the time to synchronize all of my passwords so that I could get on Sage City and I have just gotten too busy taking care of MY client's issues to be giving away my time..... Let Big Louie keep the lime light. It gets him free dinners on Sage's tab.

That's my feeling as well. It may be of benefit for us to pipe in the RSS feed of new messages as an early warning indicator whenever someone posts on Sage City. So far as volunteering the group for any type of activity aimed at bolstering Sage City that would have to come in via some type of vendor / publisher sponsorship and only after a thorough discussion. Sage (Fronius) did say they'd like to have some type of group collaboration where they could get everyone into one place for issues that need a quick second opinion/discussion. I didn't have the heart to tell them that we've had that for the past 5 years. I don't sense Sage's structure is stable enough that any such initiative on their part would last.

The answers to a lot of issues are on Sage City. It's almost a better place to look for answers than the KB at this point. It was a good conversation. They seem to genuinely want to do something to improve a lot of the issues. My biggest concern is: Will any of these folks we're talking to be there in 2-3 years?

Years? How about months...

Regardless, they'll need at least that long to make any changes.

SAP Just updated their portal and it is better (I didn't say good), so there is hope.

To be clear, this is the team responsible for the KB & Sage City. They don't have any responsibility for the portal. I think that team, much like the portal, doesn't really exist.

Is sage city spidered And ungated?

It's spidered by Google but not by the Sage KB search engine yet. There are gated areas like the partner section which I don't believe is being spidered by Google.