Sage News and Discussion

Sage Inventory Advisor - Sales & Installation Training Notes from Jun 18 & 19 2013 Attached are my notes from the two days of Sage Inventory Advisor (SIA) training. We weren't provided with the PowerPoints yet, but Sage said they'd be posted at mysagesell.com soon. High Points of Note: ""Implementation Fee"" charged by Sage is not really an implementation fee. Sage is NOT installing the product, the reseller/consultant handles the install. Great effort made to get them to change the wording of this from implementation to something else like setup fee. Fee does cover all the SageU training for the end-user. Sage to share part of this fee and I suggested there be a sliding scale in favor of partner after one or two installs. Monthly fee for accessing and using SIA counts toward tier, but not clear idea if there will be a commission. Netstock wrote the product - works with Sage 100, 300, X3 and 500 but also when I asked point blank they did say it works with other ERPs too, but none specifically mentioned. Positioned to sell more like and ""app"" than a full ERP system - the sales training emphasized quick demo, with a ""like it keep paying monthly fee else cancel"". Can cancel with 5 days notice. Installs pretty easy - if you follow recommendations. I lked the product but am leary of the partner compensation model they're not finished with setting up, that it doesn't handle work order routings, so it's not a full MRP replacement if you have WO. All in all though it certainly makes for the potential to be a great add-on for clients looking for consolidated order/stock information, forecasting, and handling issues such as out of stocks and over stocks, to name just a few. And looks a great deal better than the MRP inqiruy and reports.

Use of Dropbox for an Enterprise level app is a bit different.

The pitch was to use what works, is long proven and cost effective. This is also reflected in the use of csv files to upload/download information.

Yeah, I am working with a few customers on selling them Sage Inventory Advisor and was surprised when they specifically state that they use dropbox to transfer data. Stating how secure it is and easy to setup/use to transfer data.

Here is link for the installation steps for SIA. Craig de Kock wrote them up and sent me the link - scroll down to the bottom of this first page for a step by step of the install: http://wiki.sageinvadv.net/Installation

What exactly goes into that shared DropBox folder? Hopefully nothing confidential since it seems to be merely a subfolder of SIA main DropBox. Which means someone has access to all that data. Nice link! Posted to our LinkedIn and FB

The csv files uploaded (from ERP) and downloaded (from SIA) and I see you're point on the DropBox folder - if you've setup a unique (and they emphasize using a unique one) dropbox account then ""shared"" is a relative term, it depends on who you share that with. On the server side where the dropbox downloads the files to view for SIA are these same files but only the local admin account used for syncing has read and write access. All other users access this should be set to read only, and should only be those users that would have access to this type of data in the ERP system anyway. The only other ""user"" that sees DropBox files is SIA.

My concern is that on the SIA side whoever controls that Dropbox account has access to all the subfolders.

The SIA side as in Netstock? Or the SIA side as in the client?

@WayneSchulz ... and rights to share the folder (intentionally or otherwise).

Someone at Netstock/SIA is sharing subfolders of their Dropbox. The main Dropbox login would have permission to view all the subfolders. It may be that the CSV data is not all that usable outside the program so it's more of a non-issue. Don't know.

I see - the Netstock side - well I opened a couple of the files in Excel while at training and sorry to tell you, it's pretty clear what is what. If you create an email address for the client to use with dropbox that doesn't include their domain, like use a gmail account, it might help but ultimately that dropbox email account is connected to the client and SIA knows who the client is. Would be necessary since it's a monthly plan that can be canceled.