Who said upgrading Sage MAS 90/200 ERP add-ons was tough?

Having read some of the rumours, speculations and stories around the recent Sage MAS 90/200 ERP v4.4 release since… well for over 18 months in total I guess, the Hilltops IT ConnectIt Software development had been ‘looking forward’ to receiving the copy of the Sage MAS software with some trepidation. Following the Sage MAS formal production release, it also took us some time to get our development copy (thanks to the pro-active member of the US Sage MAS team there for seeing our LinkedIn post that got it dispatched the next day!) and so the anticipation rose.

“It can sometime be ‘challenging’ maintaining backwards and forwards compatibility with software for integration solutions.” says development lead Stephen Siggs “Software authors – and all of them have been guilty, this is absolutely not a dig at Sage – have been known to rework API features, redesign database schemas and fundamentally rewrite aspects of their software which can simply ‘break’ add-ons.”

Friday 2^nd April 2010 the ConnectIT development team have got the Sage MAS installation CDs and a copy of Sage MAS and QuoteWerks development environment ready to upgrade. A scan of the Sage MAS Upgrade and Installation Guides followed by a more thorough read of the parts around upgrading an existing installation and company accounts and they’re good to go. A couple of hours later, both the server and workstation parts of Sage MAS 90 are installed, the previous v4.2 companies data migrated and the database files converted.

Looking through the company databases in Sage MAS and everything has converted across ok, including all of the documents and customer records created by the ConnectIT QuoteWerks to Sage MAS90/200 link software. Reading the revised ‘File Layouts and Program Information’ and ‘Object Reference’ help files and all the processes and procedures we have been using still seem to be there. Time to jump in and run the ConnectIT software!

A small configuration change to reflect the new path for the Sage MAS90 ‘Home’ directory and ConnectIT is transferring documents and customers from QuoteWerks into Sage MAS90 v4.4! So… the development team breathe, relax and ask “what was all the fuss about!!!?”

Thank you Sage MAS development team – what our development team had anticipated as being a tricky upgrade has actually been incredibly painless! 🙂