Stephen Smith's Blog

Introduction

We introduced the Sage 300 ERP Inquiry tool in our 6.0A release. This tool was part of the new Web Based Portal. I blogged about it here, this blog was written before release when we were call it the Adhoc Query tool. With the 6.0A release we had query templates for General Ledger (G/L), Accounts Payable (A/P) and Accounts Receivable (A/R). With our upcoming 2012 release, we are adding query templates for Inventory Control (I/C), Order Entry (O/E) and Purchase Orders (P/O).

The new query templates (or data domains) that are being added are:

• Inventory Items
• Inventory Item Transactions
• Order Entry Invoices
• Order Entry Sales History
• Purchase History
• Purchase Orders

Remember that the intent of the Inquiry tool was to be easy to use, so anyone can inquire on their data without requiring any assistance or support.

Examples

Let’s look at a few simple examples. For instance, say you want to know everything that our favorite customer, Ronald Black, has purchased from us? We can then use the “Order Entry Sales History” template and select our customer as 1200 from a “Finder”, and immediately see a list of everything he purchased. We can then add a totals line to see the total. If we wanted to we could group this by year or period and see subtotals for these.

Suppose we wanted to know what our total sales of “Halogen Desk Lights” is and who is purchasing them?

These were just two simple examples using Order Entry Sales History. Hopefully with these data domains for the operations modules, you can get answers to the questions you have about what is happening in your company.

The intent is that you can inquiry and report on questions to do with your inventory and operational transaction histories to help you with projections, better manage inventory levels and to direct marketing to your customers based on their history. Hopefully the P/O queries will help you better manage your vendors and to help your company control costs by having more visibility into its purchasing patterns.

Remember you can print these, export these, choose the columns and sort order. You can have any number of selection criteria; there are five types of totals that can all be grouped by a field. Again the primary idea is keep the operation of this screen really simple, so anyone can ask questions on their data this way.

Developers

If you still need additional data queries (data domains) you can get a developer to create these for you. I blogged on how to do this here. Any of these that you created previously will continue to work. Just beware that you will need to move them to the inquiry61a folder when you upgrade. Unfortunately there is still the limitation that you can’t add menu categories to the Inquiry menu, but at least now there are 3 more existing places to choose from.

Summary

We continue to fill out the web based functionality we introduced in Sage 300 ERP Version 6.0A. This is just one of the many new features that our next release Sage 300 ERP 2012 provides.

Introduction

We introduced an integration from Sage 300 ERP (Accpac) to Sage Exchange in version 6.0A (with a retrofit to 5.6A). This integration allows ERP users to take credit card transactions directly from ERP screens including pre-authorizations and charges. I blogged about this in these two articles: Accpac Credit Card Processing and Accpac Payment Processing.

Now as we approach our next release we are including a number of enhancements to this integration. We are in the process of changing our version numbering scheme, so the next release of Sage 300 ERP will be Sage 300 ERP 2012 rather than 6.1A. However it is still the next version of Sage 300 ERP after 6.0A.

With this upcoming release we are going to add three main features:

• Ability to capture pre-authorizations in Shipment Entry, Invoice Entry or either. Currently users can only capture pre-authorizations in Shipment Entry when items are shipped.  Many customers tell us that they would prefer to have office personnel perform the capture rather than have this done during Shipment Entry.
• Ability to capture a number of orders from different customers in a batch rather than individually. This will streamline operations, especially in high-volume companies.

• System will automatically ‘force’ an expired pre-authorizations without prompting the user whether they want to force a pre-authorization. “Force” is the process of doing a capture (post-authorization) for a pre-authorization that has expired. Currently there is a prompt that appears if it has expired and users have to select whether they want to force a payment.  This change streamlines operations and removes unnecessary user interaction with the software.

Capture Pre-Authorizations During Invoice Entry

This feature basically means exposing the functionality already available from Shipment Entry in Invoice Entry. Capturing a pre-authorization, really just means charging the credit card for real, so you get paid. The earliest you are allowed to capture (or charge) the credit card is when the item ships as per credit card processing rules. However due to separation of duties, in many companies the people doing the shipping aren’t the right people to process the credit card. Usually this needs to be done by a finance person and it is most convenient for them to do this when they prepare the Invoice (since the shipment has already been done).

Here is the Invoice Entry screen displaying Invoice Prepayments screen with full credit card functionality. Notice the “Capture…” button on the main form.

When you hit Charge, you get the “Capture Pre-authorization” screen:

And then you when you hit “Process Payment” it will capture the Pre-Authorization, so you will be paid.

Capture a Batch of Orders

Now, let’s look at how we will “capture” a number of orders in a batch. For any orders that have been pre-authorized, this means to really charge their credit card. To do this we have create a new Form in the Order Entry Transactions folder:

When you run this Form you get:

From this screen you specify the A/R Batch to add the transactions to (or create a new one). Then you can get a list of Orders which are candidates for charging. To be in the list, the Order must have an outstanding pre-authorization and have shipped. It is a rule from the Credit Card companies that you can only charge for items that have shipped to the customer. Select which Orders you want to capture (charge). Once you have chosen all the Orders, then all you need to do is hit the “Process” button and away it goes.

This should make it easier for companies to process a high volume of Orders.

Automatically “Force” Expired Pre-Authorizations

In the current system if a pre-authorization has expired then we put up a yes/no question when you go to capture the transaction asking whether you want to “force” it. Forcing a transaction may not work for various reasons and usually causes higher transaction fees on the transaction. This is why we put up the warning dialog, so if people don’t want the extra fees then they can avoid them.

However the feedback we have received is that this prompt is just annoying. If you are taking credit card transactions then you are willing to put up with the fees and you would like to try to get any money you can. For instance if the transaction fails because they have maxed their credit card, well if you hadn’t tried, you wouldn’t get anything anyway (or would get something like a bad check which has its own fees).

We may offer an option for this, but it seems like the consensus is that people would like the process streamlined.

Summary

The original credit card processing support that we previously added has been quite successful and we are looking to build on this by continuing to add functionality in each release based on customer feedback. Hopefully these new features will keep our Sage Exchange integration growing and as it grows we will get more feedback and enhance the integration further. Notice that sometime listening to feedback means streamlining a process or removing a feature, not just adding new bells and whistles.

Introduction

Sage Advisor is an umbrella term for a number of technologies and programs that are being rolled into all Sage products over their coming releases. Previously I blogged on the Sage Advisor Update project here. In this blog post I’m going to talk about the Sage Advisor PEP (Product Enhancement Program).  The intent of this program is to actively gather program usage information to help Product Managers and Application Designers better focus their work and to do a better job designing and specifying new features for future versions.

This sort of information gathering is becoming very common in the software industry. Microsoft has a very extensive program that they call their Customer Experience Improvement Program.  Mozilla Firefox has a telemetry program to gather performance data. Cisco has their Smart Call Home functionality. All SaaS applications do this big time. Every SaaS application logs every call to the web server and then can archive and mine this data endlessly. For SaaS applications you don’t have a choice, since you need to talk to the Web server to talk to the application.

It’s important to remember that participation in this Sage program is purely voluntary and easy to opt out of. Further no actual data from your database is ever transmitted. We are also subject to various governmental privacy laws such as HIPAA.

This feature has been around for a while now in one form or another. We introduced the “Call Home” feature in Sage 300 ERP 5.6A. This feature sent back information on which modules a customer had activated. It was a one-time message that was sent a few months after a new version was installed and activated. With version 6.0A we introduced PEP level 1, which sent similar information to Call Home but was sending it to the central Sage collection server rather than a special one only for Sage 300. With the forthcoming Sage 300 ERP 2012 release, we’ll be implementing level 2 which sends more usage data as explained below.

To do detailed user testing, a usability lab gives the best results, but this is quite expensive and time consuming for customers. The hope here is to virtualize some of this process and get a lot of useful data without all the manual work.

Goals

The goal of this project is to provide better information to our Product Managers, Usability Analysts, Business Analysts and other developers on how real users use our products. We need to know where users are spending their time, where they are productive and where they aren’t productive. We need to know which parts of the program are working well and which parts are causing problems.

Basically we want to guide our design and efforts based on data and not opinion. This is one of the methods we are using to gather real customer usage data.

Data we are Gathering

One of the things we want to determine is where users spend their time, so we are gathering data on what screens the user starts and how long they are in that screen. From this we can get hard data on which are the really heavily used screens and then spend more effort on improving these screens. Generally we know some screens users spend a lot of time in, like Order Entry, but we are looking for surprises here. Further we can see what combinations of screens people run, so if they always run A/R Customers at the same time as O/E Orders, then we can infer there is information in this screen required by everyone doing Order Entry and that to improve the workflow we should make this information more readily available in Order Entry. Generally this is a matter of simplifying workflows and making our customers more productive.

We want to simplify the parts of the program where users are having difficulty. To do this we are recording the usage of the Help. Basically recording all links to the help, this way we can determine the parts of the program that people are finding difficult and having to consult the help. Then we can work on the associated forms to make them more intuitive, so the user doesn’t need the help anymore.

Along the same lines we are recording all error messages displayed. This is to see if we can change the workflow, so the user doesn’t get errors. Also if we can pro-actively avoid error situations we hope to avoid a lot of support calls. For instance if after installing many people get a certain error that indicates things aren’t setup correctly, can we modify our installation program so people won’t run into this?

Big Data

Many Sage corporate presentations start with a slide proclaiming we have 6.3 million customers. This is great, but now with Sage Advisor PEP that means we now have 6.3 million customers sending usage data to a corporate web server and all this data needs to be recorded and analyzed.

This starts to put us into the world of “Big Data”. I blogged about Big Data and ERP here. Currently we are gathering all the data into SQL Server, but this is already strained with only a few Sage products contributing. We are already moving the data from the SQL Server to a NoSQL database to perform data analysis. As the volume of data continues to grow we will probably need to replace the SQL Server with something more scalable and this is a classic use case for a NoSQL database. To me this is an exciting initiative to use and become familiar with Big Data technology. As Sage moves forward this will become a more and more important technology to gain expertise in.

We do take care that we won’t delay people using their business application to send usage data. We always start a new thread or program to transfer the data so we don’t block the main program for the user as it upload data. Also we don’t consider this data “crucial” so we don’t need to worry too much if some is lost because the system is too busy.

Summary

Gathering usage data is becoming more and more common in the software industry. Sage is stepping up our efforts to gather good usage data from all our products. The primary goal of this is to feed this back into the organization to improve our products and processes. To become more scientific in the ways that we improve our products.

Introduction

There is a lot of debate on the relative benefits of installing software on-premise versus using a cloud or SaaS based product. Generally for SaaS based software you don’t need to manage backups or infrastructure, that is all done for you and you don’t need to perform software updates, they just continually happen in the background.  On-premise software then gives you more control of your environment, allows greater customization and you don’t need to worry about your data being in someone else’s hands.  The team at Software Advice wrote a good article on the benefits of on-premise software here.

One of the advantages of SaaS, is not having to install updates, just having them appear magically, ready for your use. On-premise software can do this as well via auto-updates. For instance the Google Chrome browser will silently update itself whenever it notices a new version is available and usually you never notice that it has updated itself. Other products let you set options on how they update or prompt you whenever an update is available, letting you choose at that point what you want to do it.

Sage is looking to add automatic software updates (similar to Windows Update) to all our products called “Sage Advisor Update”. A couple of Sage products like the Nonprofit Solutions already include this. Most other products will be rolling this out with their next release over the next year. When a Sage product with this capability installs, it will add a new Sage Advisor Update program to your Start Menu. Think of this like the Apple Software Update program. Below is a screen shot with some labels of this program:

This will give you a list of all the updates available for all your Sage products installed on this computer. From this program you can see what is available and then download the update and optionally also install the update. The Sage Advisor Update is aware of client/server type installations as well as security requirements for installation (like being an Administrator).

Starting Slowly

Sage has a large set of business applications, based on all sorts of technologies and using all sorts of customization schemes. Running auto-update on an ERP which has source code customizations will remove all those customizations. Installing a product update that includes Crystal Reports runs the risk of over-writing customized reports. Perhaps all the workstations need an update to match a server update and this needs to all be done at once rather than at the whim of a single workstation user. Plus most large business applications are integrated to all sorts of third party products and compatibility with all these needs to be checked.

These are all the sort of pain points that cause upgrades to be historically expensive. Ultimately we would like to be able to silently and frictionless install updates without any user intervention. But we will start slow. For the initial releases, Sage Advisor Update will notify you of updates and download them for you. However it won’t take the next step of automatically installing them. This then allows you to contact your business partner to confirm whether whatever needs installing is safe for you given the customizations, third party products or integrations you might be running. Additionally Sage Update Advisor is fully configurable so you can tell it what you want done or not done.

Perhaps it will be a while before we can perform a major version upgrade silently behind the scenes. However perhaps we can automatically install some critical hotfixes that we know won’t break customizations. Perhaps we can quickly reach the point of quietly installing product updates behind the scenes. Part of this is discipline on Sage’s part to be very careful in product updates that we aren’t doing anything that will break customizations.

Customizations

All Sage products tend to have upgrade-safe customization and upgrade-unsafe customizations. Upgrade safe customizations will not be broken by Product Updates and new versions of the software. The other will (might) be broken (or will break the new version). For instance for Sage 300 if you customize a Crystal Report in the directory where its installed, then it is not upgrade safe since it will be over-written by a new version. However if you place that report in a customization directory then it is upgrade-safe since it won’t be over-written. Similarly for Sage 100, if you use the customizer tool, then you are upgrade-safe, if you modify the source code, then you aren’t.

As we move forwards we want to make all customizations upgrade-safe. This way new versions can be installed at a far lower cost than they are today. Ultimately then customizations won’t be an issue to upgrading and won’t be an impediment to the Sage Advisor Update program.

Frictionless Upgrades

Ultimately we would like to make the whole upgrade process frictionless and remove the current large cost in upgrading customer’s business applications. Sage Advisor Upgrade provides a tool that can notify you when upgrades are available, download them and possibly install them. The next step is ensuring that our product updates don’t cause problems with customizations. Either by investing more in upgrade-safe customization technology or by having the product update itself update customizations to work with the new update.

Another aspect of this is to make sure any new features are easily and naturally accessible as well as very easy to learn. To make upgrades truly frictionless, they shouldn’t require a large training effort to get everyone to effectively use them. Other aspects of Sage Advisor technology has the ability to watch how you are using the software and offer training tips to take better advantage of what you have. A very large percentage of new feature requests we receive are for features that are already in the product, so we need to do a better job of helping people make use of these.

Downsides to Avoid

That’s not to say auto-update can’t be annoying. When I returned form African Insights 2012, I booted up my home computer and then it proceeded to install Windows Updates, Apple Updates, Flash Updates, Acrobat Updates, etc., etc. Basically it took over an hour to boot my computer hand have it usable. Perhaps I shouldn’t have clicked the buttons to let all these updates proceed, but I like to stay up to date. Especially annoying are updates that require a computer re-boot to complete.

In Africa, several people I met never run Windows Update. This is because they access the Internet over the cell phone network and have very low download limits. If they let Windows Update run then it uses up their download limit and Internet access becomes quite expensive.

Of course a worse case is having some favorite program break, so you can’t use it until the next update or you have to manually un-install it and then manually install an older version. This has happened to me with Google Chrome a couple of times. Worse of course is when Windows Update messes up and you are stuck with re-installing Windows.

We need to keep all these things in mind when we deploy updates, that we aren’t just putting a lot of noise in front of customers. That we are respectful of people’s time and the fact that they need to get work done with their computer. That they may have restrictions like bandwidth limits and will need ways to work around these. We especially have to increase our product quality so that our automatic updates don’t break things and don’t cause problems. A certain number of current upgrade difficulties is due to Sage pushing upgrade tasks to Business Partners rather than automating the process; now, Sage needs to spend the time and make the investments to automate all these tasks.

Summary

I just updated my iPad and iPhone to iOS 5.1 and this was a fairly painless procedure. It took the device a little time to download and install the update, but it did it all without intervention from myself. It will be nice when upgrading large multi-user business applications is just as easy.

Introduction

Sage ERP Accpac 6.1A is starting to come together with most screens mostly implemented. Beta will be starting soon. It’s been seven months or so since we kicked off development and we’re all starting to look forward to release. I started to show a number of screens from the new Web Based Order Entry module here, now with this blog posting we’ll look at a few more aspects of Order Entry 6.1A in the web.

Remember that you aren’t forced to use the new Web UIs, we hope you will use them; however, all the regular VB based UIs are still there just like they are in 6.0A (or 5.x). This means if you have heavily customized O/E screen you can continue to use those and choose when and if you will move the customizations to the new screens. Also if you are incredibly well trained in heads down order entry on the old screens and what to maintain that, then you are free to do so. In fact you can have some users running the old screen and some users running the new screens, they all co-exist perfectly in one installation.

Generally the web based screens have the same functionality as the current VB based screens. However things may be moved around a bit or styled to look a bit nicer. Below is a screen shot of the new Order Entry UI showing the customer credit check popup. Which shows Ronald Black is very much over his credit limit.

Reports are still based on Crystal Reports. In fact we haven’t changed the current O/E reports at all. This way you can use exactly the same customized reports in the web that you are currently using in Accpac. The general mechanism of running reports is the same, you first get a screen that asks you for various ranges, filters and other options for the report, and then when you click print you get the actual Crystal Report. This means there is no extra cost re-doing customized forms when you go to version 6.1A whether you use the Web screens or not. Below is the form for getting the options for the O/E Aged Orders report:

Notice that the “Print” button is actually a combo-box where you can have the report open in a new tab, or replace the current tab. If you select a new tab, then you can have multiple versions of the report open at once and compare them. The reports are displayed in the Accpac Web Portal using the Crystal HTML Viewer. There is no requirement for a plug-in or ActiveX control. This means you can view these reports in any browser on any device. The reports are run on the server using the Crystal Java runtime, so there is no requirement for any extra server like Crystal Enterprise. When you press “Print” you get the following:

Since, so far only O/E has moved to the Web, if you drill down to a form in another module you will get a VB UI. This functionality will only work if you are running in the 32-Bit version of Internet Explorer. All other functionality works in other browsers like Chrome, Safari or Firefox; but, you can only run non-web based programs from the 32-Bit version of IE. Partly this is why the previous screen shots are from my favorite browser which is Chrome, but the next screen shot is from IE. The next screen shot shows choosing Inquiry from the Customer’s context menu in the Web Screen. Then this runs the A/R Customer Inquiry screen which we still only have a VB version for.

Of course there are Web versions of all the various statistics and inquiry screens such as Salesperson Inquiry pictured below:

Then we have all the setup screens such as Ship-via Codes pictured below:

Summary

The intent of this blog posting was to give a further view into the forthcoming Web Based Order Entry module. Just to show what’s coming soon…

Update 2011/09/17: Actually it turns out there is an open plug-in interface that works for Firefox, Chrome and Safari which has allowed us to develop a single plug-in that now lets the VB UIs run from these Browsers. So now there are no limitations using Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

The initial release of Sage ERP Accpac 6.1A will include all the Web Screens for the Order Entry module. We started showing these Web Screens publicly at the North American Sage Summit conference which I blogged on here. We had a number of sessions where we ran through the Order Entry process, entering an order in SageCRM using our Quote to Order features, then bringing that order up in the new Web Screen, charging a credit card using Sage Exchange all run from  a Web Browser. We got quite a good reception to what we were showing. We received lots of suggestions, many of which will be incorporated in the final product.

At Summit, we had a usability lab where we assigned partners and customers tasks in Order Entry and then observed how well they did completing these tasks. Out of this testing we will be making a number of adjustments to the screens shown below. Things like moving the disclosure panels for Customer Info, Custom Fields and Sale Split up above the table (right now they are below and don’t show on the screen shots below). Move the Ship-via Code out of the Customer disclosure panel and into the regular header fields. Users had a bit of trouble because Tabbing isn’t quite working and if you hit F5 the browser refreshed, but these problems will be fixed by release. Generally the Users we tested at Summit were quite good and we set a record in the percentage of tasks completed.

All the screen shots in this article are from the July 26, 2011 build of Accpac 6.1A. The product is rapidly evolving as we finish the functionality and refine the design.  We make extensive user of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allow us to change the product quite dramatically in a simple manner.

All the screen shots were made running in the Google Chrome browser. Mostly because this is my favorite browser, but also to show that we now support more than IE. The main goal of this multi-browser support is so we can run on tablets like the iPad along with Macs as well as the regular Windows PCs we’ve always supported. I like the Chrome browser because it’s very fast and seems to display web pages the best.

The first screen shot shows the new Order Entry screen running in the Sage ERP Accpac Portal. For regular Accpac users this screen should still look familiar, but updated to a more modern appearance. This is the screen and notebook tab where you would do most of your data entry. Here you would enter all the detail lines that make up the order.

Once you have entered all your detail lines, then you would go on to possibly confirm the sales tax information from the Taxes tab. And then go to the Totals tab to confirm the order totals and possibly give a discount as shown in the screen shot below:

Generally as a mid-market ERP product there are quite a lot of fields in Accpac’s various records. For instance in the Order Detail record which is displayed in the table, potentially a user could have to do quite a bit of horizontal scrolling to access all the fields. Plus we now have the detail optional fields in line in the table rather than in a popup resulting in even more columns. Of course you can customize your table to set the field widths to anything you wish and from the View menu on the upper right corner of the table you can re-arrange the fields and hide fields you don’t use. However Accpac has always had the concept of a “Zoom” form where you can get a form view of all the fields in the table. In fact the zoom form gives you access to a bit more information than is available directly in the table. With 6.1A and the Web UIs we have preserved that and you can bring up a form or zoom view of the table as show in the following screen shot:

As we’ve designed the new Order Entry screens we’ve tried to keep the information you need as handy as possible without completely cluttering up the screen. We’ve used a number of techniques to accomplish this including notebook tabs, disclosure panels and popup forms. The popup forms can be run from buttons or from hyperlinks. Below is a screen shot where the user clicked on the quantity available link to get a popup showing the quantity available by location.

Summary

We are very excited to be finally rolling out Web Based Accounting Applications. We’re hoping that only requiring an URL to run will reduce TCO for all our users. We are hoping that the new improved designs will make learning and using the product much easier.

I talked in general terms about types of cloud solutions in my blog post “Accpac in the Cloud”. In this blog post I’m going to talk more specifically about how Accpac currently runs in our AccpacOnline.com environment and the changes we are making to support running the 6.x Web version as a true SaaS solution.

AccpacOnline.com

AccpacOnline.com is our current cloud offering for both Sage ERP Accpac and SageCRM. This site hosts Sage products as well as a number of associated ISV solutions. For the current Accpac we use Citrix to run separate sessions for each client logging in. Clients are load balanced across our servers, but any combination of clients can be running on any given server. There is then a separate cluster of SQL Servers to contain all the various customer databases. Below is a diagram of the AccpacOnline.com infrastructure.

When you access Citrix to run Accpac, you first login to Windows then you run the regular Accpac desktop and get the regular Accpac desktop displaying its sign on screen. In the sign on screen you only get the list of your companies (and no one else’s) plus you can only sign on with user ids that are issued to you. So how does AccpacOnline.com keep all the various users of Accpac straight given that several completely unrelated customers’ users can be running Accpac on the same server?

When you install Accpac you have to specify two directories the program files and the shared data directory. The program files are where all the program executables are stored, all the DLLs, OCXs and EXEs. These programs are the same for all customers of AccpacOnline and are shared. However the shared data directory is kept separate so that all the users for a particular customer get their own shared data directory and hence their own preferences, users and companies. But how do we do this? Since technically inclined users of Accpac will know that the location of the shared data directory is stored in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE which is global to all users. Basically we rely on Windows to do this, we install the program files to the regular location on c:, but then we install the shared data to a g: drive. This drive is a mapped drive that points to a different folder for each AccpacOnline customer. So when a user of that customer signs into Windows through Citrix, a login script then maps the G: drive to the appropriate folder for that customer.

This then gets the user up and running with the correct environment. This isn’t a security measure though; all the various folders are additionally protected by Windows security settings so users of a given customer don’t have any sort of access to data belonging to another customer. So even if they could figure out how to map drives to other peoples folders, it still wouldn’t work for their login id.

An alternative approach used by many vendors is to run a separate virtual server for each customer. Basically this model is managed hosting where rather than have a physical server on-premise; you have a virtual server in the cloud. However going this way is more expensive for a number of reasons. With the AccpacOnline model all the users are sharing the same installation, so for us, updating the program files is easy, we don’t need to login in to hundreds of virtual servers to apply hotfixes or product updates. Plus we are only running one copy of the operating system, so the operating system memory and resources are shared. With the managed hosting model each customer has their own copy of the operating system using memory and resources. This means that with the AccpacOnline model we can run many more users per physical server bring down the cost of the service.  The real game of cloud services is how you can architect it, to bring down the cost per user in order to run a competitive service.

Moving to Accpac 6

With Sage ERP Accpac 6 we are rolling out Accpac as a true Web based application. There are many reasons to do this that have considerable customer value. One of the primary reasons to move Accpac to the web is to improve the AccpacOnline.com experience and to reduce the costs to operate AccpacOnline.com to reduce the overall TCO. Basically we are looking to run a modern Internet SaaS business running Accpac. You will access it through the browser like most other Web based applications.

The key to AccpacOnline.com today is that you first login to Windows, this then establishes which customer you are a user for and sets up the environment for you. The key point is that this is a two-step sign on process, first you sign on to Windows to establish which customer (or tenant) you are and then you sign on to a given Accpac user for that customer. In the web world we will do the same thing. Sign on will be a two-step process where first you sign on using the same credentials you would use to sign on to Windows, this will then establish which customer (tenant) you are and connect then present you with the Accpac sign on screen where you select which company you are currently using (and you can only choose from one of your own companies) and your session date. What is happening behind the scenes will be transparent to the user, they will just see nice Web screens where first they type in their user and password then next choose their company and session date.

In this environment Accpac is running under a Web Server and all customers are sharing the same pool of Web Servers. So we don’t have fancy Windows drive mappings to keep things separate for us. Back when we developed Sage ERP Accpac 5.6A, we knew this was coming, so we changed the Accpac API so that all calls would reflect the given customer (tenant) and retrieve the correct data for them. So most ISVs that develop third party applications should have adapted to this environment as part of supporting the 5.6A View Template. In the on-premise version of Accpac any older APIs are still present for compatibility. However in the AccpacOnline.com version, these APIs will be removed (usually low level functions missing an hSIB or hPIB parameter).

The new Sage ERP Portal that was introduced in 6.0A is implemented as a common component and as a result keeps its data in separate files and databases from the main Accpac application. As a result it underwent a bit of refactoring to separate out this data by customer and to tie into the new multi-step sign on process.

When running our VB UIs under Citrix, multiple customers are sharing the same operating system running as Citrix users on the Windows Server, but each user is running their own copy of the various Acccpac EXEs and DLLs. Basically Citrix and Windows Terminal Services keeps each user quite isolated from each other and each gets their own running programs. This then becomes quite expensive on memory since each process has its own memory space. Although this is far better than virtualizing each customer, we can do quite a bit better. With the new AccpacOnline we will run far fewer processes. We will pool resources and requests will be processed by worker threads for the duration of the run. This then means each user uses far less memory and other server resources allowing more users per server and again reducing the TCO of the AccpacOnline service.

Of course we will have multiple application servers available to handle requests and then load balance these requests across the servers (as we do today with Citrix).

We won’t be combining client databases into one database like Salesforce.com does. Part of what they do is a result of using Oracle as their database where each database requires a database server process running. We will be using SQL Server where we can have multiple databases kept separately within one SQL Server process. Further this allows us to use Accpac’s inherent multi-version support to allow clients to upgrade to new versions when they wish. Most ERP customers want control over version upgrades. NetSuite accomplishes this with separate sets of servers per version, but we can do a bit better than this.

Even though clients can upgrade when they wish, we will be trying to make it as easy as possible to upgrade. We call this frictionless upgrade. We want to reach a state where we can regularly roll out new product updates or even versions where clients are upgraded silently in the night and it just works the next day. We still have a ways to go down this road, but that is the end goal.

Summary

We are really excited about clients running Accpac both as an on-premise installed Web application and as a true hosted Web application. I previously blogged about SaaSifying Sage and a lot of that ties in to how we deliver and operate AccpacOnline.com.

As we finish preparing Sage ERP Accpac 6.0A for release, much of the buzz around this release is the new Web Based technology platform. But for existing Accpac customers, what is the compelling business value? Why will existing customers want to upgrade? Will this upgrade be disruptive?

Upgrade Costs

A lot of times choosing to upgrade is a matter of balancing the costs of the upgrade versus the benefits of running the new software. This release is a little different from the past few releases where we were updating the accounting functionality. In the past few releases the costs of an upgrade were taken up by things like the time to convert the database to the new version, the time to verify and update customized reports, the time to verify and update macros and other customizations and then the time of training on any new or affected existing features. With version 6, the database conversion is much smaller than the past few releases and the changes to the database and Accpac Views is very minimal. This means that database activation should be relatively quick and painless, and that very few changes are required to existing customized reports and macros. In fact you could just install the version 6 update to the existing functionality, activate to version 6 and be done. This would reduce your upgrade cost, but not give you the full benefit of the new version (you would still get the lock fiscal periods by module functionality).

The main new features of Accpac 6 are accessed from the new Accpac Web based Portal (or in the case of the new CRM Integration, requires that this be installed). This requires a Web server to run. If you are already using SageCRM then you already have a Web Server and just need to determine if it has the spare capacity to run Accpac as well (which it might already be doing via the current CRM integration). Or you might have a file server that is only doing file serving and has plenty of spare capacity to run the Accpac web components. Otherwise you will need a new server. Installing the new Web components is largely the same as installing Accpac on a current file server, since all the new web components are installed as part of this process. For more information see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/installing-and-deploying-sage-erp-accpac-6-0a/.

Upgrade Benefits

When we were deciding on the roadmap for rolling in out the new Accpac 6 platform there was a lot of debate about whether to roll out modules (like G/L) ported to the new web based architecture first, or to roll out new features first. A lot of this discussion focused on who would benefit: new users versus the installed base. We do a lot of surveying of customers and a lot of visiting customers to determine what the real pain points are and what the real business needs are. From these studies it was clear that improved reporting, improved business intelligence and improved CRM integration were of a higher need than getting existing modules in the new framework. So below we’ll quickly mention each feature and its benefit to current Accpac users.

Locking Fiscal Periods by Module

One very frequently requested feature is the ability to lock fiscal periods by module. This is now incorporated into Accpac and available to all users whether you use the new web component or not. This is a top vote getter from our idea suggestion web site. This feature gives you the ability say to lock a fiscal period for AR, AP, IC, OE, PO but keep it open for GL as you finish up month end. For more information on this see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/sage-erp-accpac-6-0-%E2%80%93-locking-fiscal-periods-by-module/.

Reporting and Business Intelligence

A very common feature request is more and better reporting and business intelligence. We made improvements here in 5.6A with the addition on Accpac Intelligence. With 6.0 we continue with the addition of the Portal Dashboards and the new Accpac Inquiry Tool. The goal of the Portal Dashboard is to give you an instant view of the state of your business in a simple graphical snapshot. For more information on the new dashboard see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/sage-erp-accpac-6-0-data-portlets/. The goal of the new Accpac Inquiry tool is to give you a simple way to view your data without requiring custom Crystal reports. We made the tool extremely simple so that anyone can easily use it to study their Accounting data and to use it to make informed business decisions. For more information on Accpac Inquiry (called Adhoc Query when I wrote this blog article) see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/sage-erp-accpac-6-0-adhoc-query/.

The New Web Portal

The new Web based portal is a new launch point for doing your work in Accpac. You use it to access all the new functionality including running Accpac Inquiry and viewing the new Dashboards. Plus you can run any existing accounting screens from the Tasks menu or from the easily customized shortcuts bar. For more information on the new portal see:  http://smist08.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/the-sage-erp-accpac-6-0a-portal/ and for more information on running accounting screens see:  http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/running-classic-forms-in-sage-erp-accpac-6/.

Lowering TCO

A key initiative as we move forward is to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This includes making installation and upgrading to new versions easier, providing better active help to prevent you getting stuck and arranging forms for maximum productivity. For all the new features we are developing we are spending a lot of time making sure they are easy to learn and once learned you can use them very efficiently. Hopefully you will see this new ease of use in the new Portal and in the new SageCRM integration components for Quotes to Orders.

The goal in the end is to have a single server install and to not require anything be installed on the workstations, so for an upgrade one simple install is all that is required.  We won’t be there until all the accounting screens are moved over to the new framework, but this is the start of that journey.

However as we do move to the new Web accounting screens we will still leave the current Windows screens in place. This allows you to go to these new versions, but to move to the web screens at your own pace. You can even run a mixture of forms since they all access Accpac through shared business logic. This means that if you have invested heavily in customizations, you can keep using these, you don’t need to invest in moving these to the new screens. You can also choose to have some users use the new screens, some the current by the individual user’s preference. Sometimes people have such good muscle memory of using the current screens they can enter data in their sleep and don’t want to lose that productivity.

For more information on TCO see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/on-total-cost-of-ownership/. For more information on the new User Assistance (help) system see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/sage-erp-accpac-6-user-assistance/.

Quotes to Orders

SageCRM is already a nice modern Web based application. A common complaint about our CRM integration is that whenever you run an Accpac screen a Windows form leaps up out of the nice CRM web pages. This is disjointing and makes it clear you are running two applications. With Quotes to Orders we have developed web based versions of various screens to do with quote and order entry using the new framework and included them in our CRM integration. So now the Accpac screens are styled like CRM pages and make it appear as if you are staying in one application as you move between CRM pages and Accpac pages. In addition the quote and order screens have been made far easier to use by sales people so that they can be more productive taking orders. For more info on Quote to Orders see:  http://smist08.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/sage-erp-accpac-6-0-quote-to-orders/.

Summary

Sometime people just see upgrading as a cost of doing business; that they have to do it now and again to remain supported and to work properly on the newest versions of Windows, Office or other components. We do want to make upgrading have a lot more value than this. And we do want to reduce the disruption and cost that upgrading entails.

We’ve worked hard to reduce the costs of upgrading and worked hard to maximize the value by listening to what you the customer really wants. Hopefully this approach has provided sufficient ROI that people will want to upgrade and the percentage of people that do will be quite high. Hopefully this approach gives you confidence in the future of Accpac that we are actively developing useful new features and technologies while protecting the investments you have made in the present.

Introduction

A key goal of the Sage ERP Accpac 6.x series is to completely revamp the Accpac User Interface technology. The goal is to transform Accpac into a technologically leading product again. We want to ensure that through this technology transformation we make Accpac an extremely competitive market leading product. This blog post will look at the technologies being incorporated into the Accpac 6.x platform and compares them to other technologies to highlight a few of the differentiators that set Accpac apart. We will also examine what we will be able to do with the building blocks being put in place.

This blog posting talks about the technologies being incorporated to make Accpac more competitive. However there is much more to competitiveness than the technology platform being used. We are also making changes to business models, marketing, product features, integrations, migrations, verticals, etc. All of these have just as big an impact on competitiveness as technology. All of these reflect that Accpac isn’t sitting still, but that all departments are moving ahead at a rapid pace to stay ahead of the constant change that we see in the market today. But I’ll leave those topics to other people’s blogs.

Usability

Besides advancing to more modern technologies and providing a platform for future development, we are taking the opportunity of a User Interface rewrite to give the product a usability rework in the process. The goal is to greatly improve the learnability of the product, and to greatly increase the productivity of customers. This is from performing extensive end user testing and from applying modern user interface design techniques. Typically applying advanced usability to an ERP product has been the domain of small business products like Simply Accounting or Peachtree. We are looking to bring the ease of use of a small business product to the mid-market space and to develop this into another competitive advantage. We are also looking to greatly improve our user assistance, for more see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/sage-erp-accpac-6-user-assistance/.

Technology Direction

The general trend in technology is to go Web. The question isn’t whether, but how and when. A key trend driving this is that people just don’t want to install software anymore. It’s a pain. They want to just browse to a web site, possibly sign up, log on and work. People have many devices whether a PC or Mac, iPad, iPhone or Android. Ideally they would like to do their work from any of these and not have any hassles of downloading and installing applications. This trend on the front end is well underway without any resistance to adoption. On the back end many people are asking the same questions, why do we need to maintain all this server and network infrastructure? How do we reduce these costs and just have our applications work. This is driving SaaS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service). This is still underway with many problems still being solved like protection and privacy of data, what happens if you SaaS application goes out of business, control, customizability, etc.

We are fully embracing the new Web based technologies. With our Accpac 5.x platform we were web deployed but relying on ActiveX controls and IE to provide the foundation. These caused problems with security, reliability, ease of use and performance. Learning from this lesson we have gone in the complete opposite direction, writing our new UIs in pure HTML/JavaScript and not relying on any ActiveX controls, Java Applets, Browser Plug-ins or anything else that can cause installation or usage roadblocks. All we require is a modern Browser that runs HTML and JavaScript well.

Many of our competitors continue to develop Windows desktop applications using technologies like .Net WinForms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Forms), Java Swing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(Java)) or WPF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation). These applications will only run on Windows, they will not run on mobile devices, Macs or Linux PCs. They are designed exclusively for PC sized monitors and will only run on Intel/AMD hardware. The claim is that they can give a richer user experience than Web based applications, which perhaps true ten years ago, is no longer true today. Currently applications written with HTML4 can easily match the richness while applications embracing HTML5 will exceed this richness of interaction, while remaining open and device/hardware/operating system independent. Typically such applications haven’t reached the ease of use level common in Web applications like Facebook or Gmail.

Many of our competitors still use ActiveX controls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveX) and Java Applets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_applet). Again requiring special plug-ins or limiting browser and device choices. These are really just ways to start Windows applications from inside the Browser.

Many of our competitors have gone with Adobe Flex/Flash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flex) to create their Web Based UIs. The problem with these is that you require an Adobe plug-in for your browser for these to operate. This means they do not work on many phones and other devices like the iPad. They also sometimes don’t port to all platforms, so if you have 64-Bit Linux, you are out of luck.

Many of our competitors have embraced Microsoft Silverlight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight). This is worse than Flash, in that there are very limited choices for where it runs and you are really limited to only running on Windows PCs in IE or on Microsoft Phones which so far haven’t been very popular.

Again we chose HTML and JavaScript because we get full device and browser independence built on open industry standards. Our competitors will claim that they chose something proprietary to give a richer client experience. This may have been true five years ago, but today even with only HTML4, you can get just as rich an experience as these other technologies. And now with HTML5 and a whole host of newer more powerful Browsers coming to market, we can now exceed the rich client experience of these other technologies without losing TCO or locking in to proprietary platforms.

TCO

Reducing TCO is a key goal of Accpac 6. Initiatives here include requiring only a Server installation, no workstation setup, nothing else that needs to be installed on the individual workstations. Not requiring any special firewall or network setup, having everything use standard HTTP (or HTTPS). Making customizations upgrade safe, allowing you to upgrade and have customized reports and screens just work. For more details see:  http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/on-total-cost-of-ownership/.

Customization

As we move forwards we want to provide a more powerful customization model. A powerful customization model and robust SDK has always been one of Accpac’s competitive advantages, and we want to extend that. Studying what people customize currently and seeing if we can incorporate this into the product as part of the UCD review process to eliminate the need for customization. But when customizations are required we want to:

• Make more customizations straight from forms without requiring code.
• Make customizations upgrade safe.
• Have many more customizations possible from the UI designer.
• When code is required, ensure we provide the power to do more than we can currently.

For more on customizations see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/sage-erp-accpac-6-customization/.

Openness

With everything we do, we are trying to be more open. Using open standards like HTML, JavaScript, SData and XML. Any files that we save are now just XML text files that anyone can manipulate with any of the many XML tools out there (including notepad). We want to follow industry standards and best practices. We want to avoid single vendor lock in. We want to make sure we can play when the next disruptive technology comes along. We are avoiding binary file formats and binary network protocols. We are avoiding proprietary technologies developed by a single vendor. We are ensuring we can be as adaptable and open as possible. This also reduces TCO since we can leverage open source technologies like Apache Tomcat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tomcat) and Eclipse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(software)) which are freely re-distributable.

Future Foundations

Many of the technology choices and architecture we chose was to provide a foundation for future innovations including:

• Browser Independence: Due to time constraints the first version will fully support only IE 7 and 8. But everything we have done is set to support Firefox, Safari and Chrome as well. This would include desktop and mobile versions of these Browsers.
• 64-Bit – All the new technologies are fully 64-bit compliant. You can run the 64-bit versions of the browsers.  Now we are set to compile our Views for 64 bit and to produce a 64 bit version of Accpac when needed. As we scale we will be able to take advantage of huge 64-Bit memory spaces.
• SaaS – Although we are shipping as an on-premise install to start, we have architected the system for SaaS deployment at a later version.
• Advanced end to end integrations enabled through SData. As other Sage applications like SageCRM move to the same platform, we have the opportunity to integrate much more closely. With common UI components and a common SData Web Services layer, we can provide much more cross application functionality in UIs, Reports and Workflows. For instance see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/on-the-sage-gcrm-contract/.
• Performance/Scalability – With the adoption of SData Restful Web Services we can use advanced Web performance tools to test and expand the scalability/performance of Accpac from where it is today. See http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/sage-erp-accpac-6-performance-testing/.
• Server Independence – All the technologies involved in the Accpac 6 platform are server operating system independent. So we can produce a Linux Web Server version easily if we choose to do so.
• Full Unicode Support – All the new technologies fully support Unicode, so this sets the stage for creating a full Unicode version of Accpac.
• Mobile – All the new screens are pure HTML/JavaScript and can run on iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones. Plus tablet devices like the iPad. See: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/accpac-on-the-iphone-and-android/.
• HTML5 – For our first version we are only using HTML4 features, but since we are built on the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Google is aggressively pursuing HTML5 we will automatically be getting HTML5 features as they become available in the various Browsers.
• Connected Cloud – As a Web Based application, built from the ground up on RESTful Web Services, we are ideally situated to integrate with other Web Based applications based on Web Services whether these are locally installed or cloud based. This can include common ERP services like sales tax calculation or government reporting, but also integration to other services like Social Networks or Web Based Office applications (like Google Docs). Our technology platform is ideal for both consuming and producing such services.

Summary

With the Sage ERP Accpac 6.0A platform we want to ensure that Accpac is a leader in Web Technologies, Usability, Customizability and TCO. Expect to see a progression of exciting releases kicking off with 6.0A later this year.

Update 2010/10/10: Forgot to mention competing against Web 1.0 companies. Many of our competitors went to the web early with technologies like ASP.Net. These are all Web 1.0 applications meaning that they aren’t a very rich user experience and often result in fairly major page refreshes as you work. These companies may claim to be Web 2.0, but usually they have only patched in a few specific cases for show and you soon realize it isn’t used in most of the product. Many of these companies were start ups and are still fleshing out full ERP functionality and so don’t have time to go back and do a major refactoring of their UIs. Accpac’s new Web interfaces are fully Web 2.0 which use Ajax everywhere. All server calls are asynchronous and we only update individual DOM elements, never doing a page refresh. Since Accpac has full ERP business functionality already, we aren’t still filling in missing pieces.

We’re only a month or two away from the launch of Sage ERP Accpac 6.0A (for details see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/preparing-for-the-sage-erp-accpac-6-0a-launch/). A major goal of this release is to provide a smooth upgrade transition from 5.x to 6.x. There has been some concern that the new Web based components will make the product harder to install or increase the hardware requirements of the product. This blog posting will go into some detail of the parts that are the same, the parts that are new, what is optional and what you need to watch out for. We’ve put a lot of effort into the Accpac installation program to make the process as transparent and simple as possible. But sometime it’s helpful to know what’s going on behind the scenes and what is being setup for you.

Accpac Classic

If you don’t want to worry about the new Web technologies, you don’t have to. From Accpac’s installation screen you can de-select the “Portal” feature and install just like you always have.

Of course you can always add the Portal feature at any later time.

Accpac Web Portal

Whether you are doing a Workstation Setup, Terminal Server or Local programs installation, you only want to install the portal in one place on the server that will be your IIS Web Server. On all other computers if doing a full installation, be sure to un-check the Portal as an installation option. If you want to run VB UIs from the new Portal, you do need to have the ability to run the classic Windows Desktop via a workstation setup or local install.

Hopefully you will want to use the new Web Base Portal with all the new functionality available there. If you have worked with SageCRM 7.0 then much of the deployment and installation is the same. We both use a combination of IIS and Apache Tomcat to process Web Requests. In fact, when we wrote our installation script, we copied all the sections for Tomcat, Jakarta and IIS from the SageCRM installation script and just modified them for Accpac. So much of the installation is actually field tested since it has been used for many SageCRM installations.

Below is a diagram showing the main components involved in a Web Portal deployment.

IIS

If you are installing the new Web Based Portal or using Quotes to Orders from SageCRM, you need a Web Server. Hopefully you already have such a server being used as a file server or as a SageCRM server. You will install the Accpac Portal here. On this server computer you need to install IIS before you install Accpac. Since IIS is a Windows component, we can’t do that for you from our installation program. You need to either add this as a role to your server or add the Windows component from the control panel. Note that this excludes you running the new Portal on a laptop running Windows Home edition, since it does not have IIS as an option.

You don’t need to do anything beyond adding IIS, our installation program will add all our components to IIS and will configure IIS to work with Accpac. This is true if you are running internally, if you expose this Web server to the Internet or you want better internal security then you have to do a small amount of work to configure the Web Server for HTTPS and add a digital certificate to correctly identify the server to clients.

Below are the virtual directories and application pools added by the Accpac and SageCRM installation programs to IIS.

Tomcat

Our new SData services that process the various SData Web Service requests are programs written in Java (http://smist08.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/sdata-in-sage-erp-accpac-6/). To run this Java program we require a Java Application Server, which is a program that receives web requests and passes them to Java classes to be processed. The Java application server that we use is Apache Tomcat (http://tomcat.apache.org/). Behind the scenes our installation program installs Tomcat in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Sage\Sage Accpac\Tomcat6 and adds it as a Windows Service. Hopefully you never need to know this program is even here. Hopefully it is all setup perfectly and you will never need to touch it.

Below is the Windows Services dialog showing our usual service for handling .Net Remoting requests and our the new service that is the Accpac instance of Apache Tomcat.

Jakarta

Our installation program adds another component called Jakarta to connect IIS up to Tomcat. All the installation and configuration of this component is done automatically by the installation program and you don’t even have to know it is there. Basically we want IIS to serve up all static web content like HTML pages, JavaScript pages, cascading style sheets and various bitmaps. But we want any SData requests passed on to the Apache Tomcat Java application server running the Accpac SData processor.

Portal Database Configuration

The new Accpac Web Portal has its own database that it uses to store various information like you shortcuts and preferences. So you need to configure this database from Database Setup which now has a “Portal…” button which leads to the following dialog.

HTTPS

If you want to expose your Accpac Portal to the Internet or just want extra internal security then you should configure IIS to use HTTPS rather than HTTP. To do this you add an https binding to the default web site bindings. When doing this it wants a digital certificate to identify the server. You need to get this issued from Verisign (www.VeriSign.com)  or another vendor. Otherwise the Browser will complain about accessing this site, since it won’t be able to prove who it’s talking to. Additionally you will then want to disable HTTP so access only happens through a secure connection. Then you would follow all the other security best practices for managing a Windows Server (like be behind a firewall and have all unused services turned off). Often it’s worth running a tool like NMap/Zenmap (http://nmap.org/zenmap/) to confirm that you aren’t running anything unexpected that could be hacked.

Summary

Hopefully this gives some idea of the various issues and considerations installing Sage ERP Accpac 6.0A. If you are familiar with SageCRM 7.0 then this should all be old hat. Otherwise give it a try; it’s not nearly as hard as it might look.