"Through the years the Aries team has never failed to treat me with a great deal of respect. Sometimes it felt as though I were the only one they had to help that day. The knowledge they have in problem solving is remarkable."
Kathy Cardona
Carthage Fabrics Corporation
|
|
|
A free monthly newsletter about business and technology news and trends for small and medium-sized businesses. Featuring the latest updates about Sage MAS 90/200, MAS 500, Abra and CRM products. Past copies are archived on our website at www.ariestech.com. |
Tech Talk
FRx To Be Replaced: New Financial Reporting Tool for Sage MAS 90/MAS 200/MAS 500FRx, the financial report writer used with MAS 90. MAS 200 and MAS 500, will no longer be offered by Microsoft after December 31, 2010. Sage will provide support for FRx through December 31, 2012.
Sage has officially announced that Excel-based software add-on Sage MAS Intelligence (SMI) will replace FRx as the financial report writer for Sage MAS 90/MAS 200 and Sage MAS 500. SMI will be available for download at the end of August, 2010.
One of the primary ways that SMI is different from FRx is that it supports ALL of the MAS modules and not just the General Ledger module that FRx is limited to. SMI works with Microsoft Excel 2007 to offer flexible reporting and the look and feel is similar to a Microsoft Excel pivot table. Other versions are also supported but the reporting wizard will only work with Excel 2007.
Each Sage customer on a current basic maintenance plan will receive a one- user copy (4-users for MAS 500) of the Report Manager module at no charge to replace their FRx single-user product. This user will be a named license which can be installed and run on only one workstation. Other SMI modules available are Report Designer, Security Manager, Report Viewer and Connector. SMI will work with MAS 90 and MAS 200 Version 4.4 and MAS 500 Version 7.3.
Here are a few key points about the new SMI reporting tool:
- Excel-based reporting with access to all MAS modules and data.
- Includes some pre-defined operations and financial reports. These include Dashboard Analysis, Financial Reports, Sales & Purchase Reports, Financial Trend Analysis and Multicompany Reports (connector add-on required).
- User-level security available.
- Additional add-ins provide extra flexibility: saving report outputs to specific location, publishing reports in html, emailing capability, ability to run reports from a desktop shortcut.
For more detailed information, please view my blog article and Beth Bowers' article from 90Minds. Many thanks to Beth for the great information
|
Ramblings
 How To Reduce IT Costs and Stress
How can your small- to mid-sized business drastically reduce Information Technology (IT) costs and minimize the stresses of dealing with IT? The answer is in the clouds.
Almost a year ago we completely eliminated our Exchange and Sharepoint servers. Those two applications managed our e-mails and documents.
What replaced them? Google Apps. We quickly and easily moved all of our e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, images and presentations up to Google's servers in the cloud.
My favorite part of Google Apps is a component called Google Sites. Google Sites gives us the ability to setup a site for every project and share that site with our customers and business partners. Sites make collaborating with the project team more effective by providing a real-time project management tool.
Let's say that your design team and distribution center is in the United States and your manufacturing plant is in Mexico. A Site could be created each time your company creates a new design. Everyone on your project team would have the appropriate access to project scope documents, design images and the issues list. Since these documents are maintained in real-time on the Site, management would have constant access regarding whether or not the project is staying on track.
So, how exactly does Google Apps reduce costs and stress?
Using Google Apps eliminates license fees for software such as Exchange and Sharepoint and it eliminates the need to pay IT costs to support and upgrade these applications.
There are two versions of Google Apps: Standard and Premier. The Standard version is free. We elected to go with the Premier version at $50/user/year. The Premier version provides us with additional storage space (25GB as opposed to 7.4GB) and includes spam filtering and virus scanning.
Because you are able to leverage Google's virtual servers, you no longer have to worry about technical issues with servers at your site. We were able to get rid of all but one server (and our goal is to get rid of it as well). Not having to deal with servers was a huge reduction in stress for our company.
Are there downsides? Of course. We have experienced occasional periods of sluggish performance. And without internet access it is a little tough to connect to the cloud.
If you are a real Excel power-user you may be disappointed in the functionality of the Google Apps spreadsheet.
However, here is the beauty of these types of Apps: they are constantly being upgraded (sometimes daily). The upgrades happen without any effort on your part and they are included in the annual price.
Will they eventually catch up to the functionality level of Microsoft Office? Yes they will. And I think they will surpass that functionality in the not too distant future.
Is your company using Google Apps? If so, what has been your experience?
If not, why not?
Feel free to comment on this article either on our blog or the Sage blog.
|
|
