Sage 300 ERP 2012 Supported Platforms

Introduction

Whenever a new version is released, it is tested with the latest operating systems and usually bundled components are updated to the latest versions As always there will be a detailed list of all supported platforms and exact versions will be published on our website. This blog posting is a bit more informal and talks about what I think are interesting on the list. Some of this is my opinions on the various supported platforms and some of the pros and cons.

Browsers

We now have added support for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. We support IE 9 everywhere and are testing on IE 10 (need a released version before we can give a final say). We support IE 8 for Sage CRM and Quotes to Orders, but we don’t support IE 8 for the Web Portal in Sage 300 ERP.

Windows XP

We continue to support Windows XP at the SP3 level. Beware that Microsoft is currently scheduled to discontinue this support on April 8, 2014. They have extended this deadline several times already, so stay tuned. This will be dangerous since they say they will stop issuing security updates at this point. From our own surveys we know we have a large number of users still running on XP and that people may not want to have to buy new computers until absolutely necessary.

The worst thing about XP is that Microsoft doesn’t support IE 9 there and that IE8 is quite slow and buggy. The big benefit for Sage 300 ERP users is that now that we support the Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers, that is, you don’t need to use IE 8 anymore for our products. We highly recommend that you install Firefox or Chrome (you can still use IE for other things like SharePoint if you need it). In fact the Sage 300 Web Portal no longer supports IE 8 so you will need to use one of these browsers to access it. For Sage CRM (and the Quotes to Orders function), we still support IE 8.

As another note, we don’t support using Windows XP as a web server for either Sage CRM or for the Web Portal in Sage 300 ERP. If you need a web server running Windows 7 works great or use a true server version of Windows.

Windows 7

This is the main client platform we support. Sage 300 ERP runs best here and we highly recommend using this client operating system.

We support the 64-Bit version equally to the 32-Bit version. In fact we recommend the 64-Bit version since this is the only way to take advantage of the memory in any newer computer.

Windows 8/Windows Server 2012

We are running our automated tests against the release previews of these products. We can’t officially support these until we can test against the released versions, but we are hoping that if the released version doesn’t spring a major surprise, then we can support these very quickly after their release.

Note that for Windows RT (the ARM processor version of Windows 8), you can only run true web components here, any VB UIs will not run.

Initial reviews of Windows 8 are rather mixed, but like MS Vista, it will start appearing on new computers whether you like it or not.

SQL Server 2012

With this release we will be both supporting SQL Server 2012 and making SQL Server 2012 available for purchase from Sage. Microsoft provides lots of information on all the new features there. The most obvious one is that the SQL Server Management Studio is now built on the Visual Studio 2012 platform. Besides some color and style changes it appears pretty much the same to me as the previous one, only now it takes much longer to start up. I think the idea is that it then leverages the better developer tools in VS for debugging and such.

Pervasive.SQL 11

We now support Pervasive.SQL 11. One notable “feature” of this product is that product licensing and activation are more stringent. You cannot share licenses and your computer must be on-line to validate your activation code. Otherwise checkout out Pervasive’s web site for new features like multi-core support.

Crystal 2011

We now fully support designing reports with Crystal Reports 2011. We now bundle the matching runtime for this version of Crystal. Beware that SAP has separated the runtime from the Crystal Reports product, so it is actually called “SAP Crystal Reports runtime engine for .NET Framework 4” (strangely rather than for Crystal Reports 2011).  The internal version of the runtime is Version 13.  Our current plans are to bundle SP3 of this runtime and its internal version is 13.0.3.612. Since we are just starting regression on the 2012 release, there is some chance that we will end up bundling SP4 if it comes out soon.

Generally this upgrade was fairly painless. We did tweak a small number of reports, but these tended to be things that were already wrong. We did find some reports with an incorrect page size, which was ignored by the previous runtime, but now worked and caused problems. Anyway you should try your customized reports and check for alignment issues, especially for things that print on pre-printed forms.

Virtualization

Here we support Citrix Xen Apps, VMware ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1, and Windows Server 2008 Standard R2 – Hyper V.

Just remember virtualization does add some overhead and if you are running multiple images on one server, beware memory use and CPU contention.

Office

For MS Office we support 2003, 2007 and 2010. Note that we only support 32-bit office because of the way our Financial Reporter Excel plug-in works.

Summary

I didn’t cover everything here; we support Oracle 11gR2 and MS Vista SP2 for instance. But to give you a flavor and some highlights of our upgraded platform support.