We, RKL eSolutions have added Sage ERP X3 to our product offering. We have many emotions related to adding another product to our portfolio, some of those are related to the fact that we are adding this Sage ERP X3 product, more on that later.
As a Partner of a Publisher you are at their mercy for the most part to the product(s) they offer to the market. Yes, this includes Sage. We have been a Partner with Sage for a long time and I can say we hope to keep it that way. Whenever we have conversations about other ERP Publishers we always come back to the old saying, "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."
As I said before, we recently added Sage ERP X3 product to our arsenal. So this requires us as an organization to "Drink the Kool-Aid" so to speak, which brings me to writing this information. I will add my disclaimer no that these are just my opinions and thoughts.
As most of you may know Sage has quite a plethora of products in their portfolio. Attempting to select one is somewhat of a crap shoot, but I consider selecting the product of the month, just a part of the chess match between Partner and Publisher.
I just completed the scheduled 3 day training of the System Administration in 2 days. This of course has nothing to do with my ability to absorb the data faster, but more to do with Sage working through the process of creating the training curriculum for this newly added product to their portfolio. I will say that I was happy to be in attendance though. WOW, what timing for me, I was able to participate in the session today, where Rich from Sage, did a presentation on the Sage ERP X3 Web Services. This alone was worth the trip! Thank you Rich, this was much appreciated.
Since we already distracted and had time, since we already covered all he material in the current cirriculum, we also covered a few other random questions the group had. Here is a sampling of some of these items...
1. Can you run Sage ERP X3 on a MAC? Let me provide a little background as I answer this question. First X3 natively provides you with the ability to run as a thick client and a thin client (browser based). So you say to yourself, of course it can. We can just use the thin client on the MAC and the problem is solved. Well the documentation states that the current shipping version of X3, which is v6.x, only supports Internet Explorer. The X3 thin client requires an Active-X component. It will not work with Safari, FireFox or Chrome. So the answer is no, you can't natively run X3 on a MAC.
There are basically only a few ways to address this.
• RDP from the MAC to a Windows Terminal Server - http://www.microsoft.com/mac/remote-desktop-client
• Parallels virtual desktop - http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
• Create a VM on the MAC, inside the VM run Windows 7 with IE - http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/overview.html
2. If you more than X3 Process Server does it support automatic load balancing? Basically on the surface you would think this to be another fairly obvious yes. Well not so fast. There is load balancing. It is however all manual. You configure the clients to access a certain Process Server. So the load balance is simply a load splitting exercise. I only mention this as a point of clarification, as there was more than one surprised expression in the room during this explanation.
Back to those emotions I mentioned earlier...
I am enjoying getting to know this new product we now have in our portfolio of offerings for our clients. I do have a lot of other areas I will be doing some deep dives on as we embark on this exciting opportunity. I will say that I am impressed with the product, at least what I have seen so far. To date I have had many emotions about X3. They vary based on many attributes. In its simplist form I have begun to categorize these emotions in the following manner.
• Impressive - one code base for both clients
• Confusion – I feel some of this comes down to semantics
• Disappointment - lack of basic data structure best practices and functionality (at least in my opinion)
• Excitement – Workflow and Thumbnails, oh my!
• Fear – there is a lot of moving parts
Well that's all for now.