Sage 100

Well Sage is tapping our customers more. See the new logon into Sage 100 with Service update 3 for 2014.

In Sage 2014 the Job Title and Email Address fields are also in User Maintenance. I wondered what they were there for. I guess now we know.

I suspect this will be used for a couple of purposes - direct email campaigning and surveys to people based off their title. Also I bet at some point alerts of some sort working with the cloud will be used as another SAAS service to notify users of X They might as well should have asked for phone and extension number to round it off so it can flow back to their CRM.

If you fill in an email address (a bogus one) @JohnnyPabian does this no longer prompt the user?

@JohnnyPabian Does this (bottom part) go away once you complete your email address? This will also be good to seed with your own email address to see what Sage is sending out to customers. Heck you might get an offer for a $99 Sage registration and free or reduced rate hotel....

And to think we NEED the end users permission to see their support case comments.

@WayneSchulz @MoiraGoggin Looks like it going to always display this way. Even with my email address it does not go back to the old way. I do know Sage is sucking data out of user maintenance. My bet is that as many users have updated to 2014 they are not updating this info in user maintenance so they needed to take it a step further to get this info filled out so it becomes useful to sage.

I wonder whether flipping the the switch in the admin panel to turn off the sharing of data does anything to stop the flow of info? And do you think it will be very long before Sage replaces the bottom half (send us your email info) of this screen with some type of news prompts? ""Click here for info on SageCRM"" , ""Still using FRX? Try Sage intelligence Free"", "" Accept Credit Cards? Try Sage Payments At Low x % introductory rate"". Even better - what if they sell space here to their endorsed solutions. There's quite a bit of creepy ""what if"" that can be played with this latest ""feature

I was wondering the same thing, Wayne. We added turning that option off into our standard upgrade procedures. We had 2 separate instances where corruption in the SEP files caused major system problems. Users could log in but no one was able to open any tasks - it would just hang. Sage sent me clean PEP files to resolve the problem. The first time it happened it took almost a full day to figure out what was going on. Fun explaining to the client they were down the majority of a day because Sage is tracking what they're doing.

Even more fun is explaining to the client that THEY have to pay for Sage's information desire when you spent the day getting to the bottom of the issue...

Issues - one where does this per company per user info reside at Sage on a secured db? Two who has access to that data? Three when will it be compromised? Four who will sue Sage first?

I am guessing it resides in user maintenance now as that is where the record fields are displayed.

Is it me or does v2014 PU 3 seem to take forever....... to install. Goodness, it just sits cranking....

@JeffSchwenk and why would be putting PU3 on and not 5 or 7?

@JohnnyPabian - Dang, second time in as many days. Meant to say v2014, PU3........

The login return is a normal display for me after installing PU3. I had the two fields filled in previously a unique address.

Oh, yea. I'm sure they are just going to receive 'valuable tips'.... Sage is going to milk this cow dry with sales pitches...

Another thing that this login screen is good for is to tell which customers have upgraded to 2014 and on what date. It doesn't prove that the company is using the software at level 2014 but it is probably a good early indicator. I wonder if Sage has any other ""phone home"" beacons setup which indicate by customer # what level software is in daily use.

Based on the number of fixes this release had, I am sure most of the programming resources was spent on marketing issues...

They can already tell what version you are via PEP. which I think started in 4.4? is my memory correct?

I disable PEP on every upgrade unless the end user has specifically asked for it to be enabled.

Turn the PEP off and this additional information does not display.

So @JeffSchwenk PEP more or less stands for peep?

Good one. Now how do we get the word ""Tom"" out there??

We can use the french all inclusive...just add Sage to the front...