For 10 or so years now I have been working either with companies that sell Sage Line 50 / Line 100, or with clients that are running these products.
Sage Line 100 (until recently becoming MMS) used Retrieve 4GL Data structures and, oh boy, that did not like the file locking on NT based networks. We had to disable opportunistic locking, make registry changes on Windows 98 and 2000 machines, set the FILES statement in the configs, etc. Bottom line, it sucked…
Since then Sage did finally start to resolve the file locking issues with Line 100, but you can sneeze near a network cable and it’ll still corrupt data.
Sage Line 50, even though it has a nice Windows Front end, is still (from what I can make out) using a DOS database structure. It is slow, the file locking sucks and if you “push” the product in any way data corruption occurs. I have worked with a couple of developers on “plugging in” to Line 50, and every time it ends in tears or a nervous breakdown.
The stance of Sage was always “it’s your network” and with this latest article on their knowledge base I just had to write this blog post. At NO point in this article do they say “Actually – you know what – bad software design / data design by Sage may also cause data corruption”. Surprised? 🙂
There is one more thing that annoys me about Sage, and that is the fact that they constantly release versions of products with serious bugs. (Version 9 of Line 50 was a massive disaster). I recently had a client with a bug in version 9 where it only saved the first line of any multiple line remittance and I confirmed this was a known issue with Sage. I was then told that you need version 10 or above to fix this, there is no patch! I have no idea how they get away with it.
I have not yet found an open forum where Sage users get together, but I am sure that one is needed. The community really does need to give them a kick in the backside about these issues.