Accpac 6.0 - The Next Generation
Posted by Plus Sales on Fri, Oct 15, 2010 @ 08:34 PM
Sage Software will soon be releasing Accpac version 6.0, which will prove to be a game-changer. Following is an exceprt of a blog post from Stephen Smith, Software Architect at Sage, which outlines some of the major technology shifts in this new release. To read the entire article, please visit: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/sage-erp-accpac-6-competitive-advantages/
Sage ERP Accpac 6 Competitive Advantages
A key goal of the Sage ERP Accpac 6.x series is to completely revamp the Accpac User Interface technology. The goal is to transform Accpac into a technologically leading product again. We want to ensure that through this technology transformation we make Accpac an extremely competitive market leading product. This blog post will look at the technologies being incorporated into the Accpac 6.x platform and compares them to other technologies to highlight a few of the differentiators that set Accpac apart. We will also examine what we will be able to do with the building blocks being put in place.
This blog posting talks about the technologies being incorporated to make Accpac more competitive. However there is much more to competitiveness than the technology platform being used. We are also making changes to business models, marketing, product features, integrations, migrations, verticals, etc. All of these have just as big an impact on competitiveness as technology. All of these reflect that Accpac isn’t sitting still, but that all departments are moving ahead at a rapid pace to stay ahead of the constant change that we see in the market today. But I’ll leave those topics to other people’s blogs.
Usability
Besides advancing to more modern technologies and providing a platform for future development, we are taking the opportunity of a User Interface rewrite to give the product a usability rework in the process. The goal is to greatly improve the learnability of the product, and to greatly increase the productivity of customers. This is from performing extensive end user testing and from applying modern user interface design techniques. Typically applying advanced usability to an ERP product has been the domain of small business products like Simply Accounting or Peachtree. We are looking to bring the ease of use of a small business product to the mid-market space and to develop this into another competitive advantage. We are also looking to greatly improve our user assistance, for more see: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/sage-erp-accpac-6-user-assistance/.
Technology Direction
The general trend in technology is to go Web. The question isn’t whether, but how and when. A key trend driving this is that people just don’t want to install software anymore. It’s a pain. They want to just browse to a web site, possibly sign up, log on and work. People have many devices whether a PC or Mac, iPad, iPhone or Android. Ideally they would like to do their work from any of these and not have any hassles of downloading and installing applications. This trend on the front end is well underway without any resistance to adoption. On the back end many people are asking the same questions, why do we need to maintain all this server and network infrastructure? How do we reduce these costs and just have our applications work. This is driving SaaS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service). This is still underway with many problems still being solved like protection and privacy of data, what happens if you SaaS application goes out of business, control, customizability, etc.
We are fully embracing the new Web based technologies. With our Accpac 5.x platform we were web deployed but relying on ActiveX controls and IE to provide the foundation. These caused problems with security, reliability, ease of use and performance. Learning from this lesson we have gone in the complete opposite direction, writing our new UIs in pure HTML/JavaScript and not relying on any ActiveX controls, Java Applets, Browser Plug-ins or anything else that can cause installation or usage roadblocks. All we require is a modern Browser that runs HTML and JavaScript well.
Many of our competitors continue to develop Windows desktop applications using technologies like .Net WinForms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Forms), Java Swing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(Java)) or WPF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation). These applications will only run on Windows, they will not run on mobile devices, Macs or Linux PCs. They are designed exclusively for PC sized monitors and will only run on Intel/AMD hardware. The claim is that they can give a richer user experience than Web based applications, which perhaps true ten years ago, is no longer true today. Currently applications written with HTML4 can easily match the richness while applications embracing HTML5 will exceed this richness of interaction, while remaining open and device/hardware/operating system independent. Typically such applications haven’t reached the ease of use level common in Web applications like Facebook or Gmail.
Many of our competitors still use ActiveX controls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveX) and Java Applets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_applet). Again requiring special plug-ins or limiting browser and device choices. These are really just ways to start Windows applications from inside the Browser.
Many of our competitors have gone with Adobe Flex/Flash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flex) to create their Web Based UIs. The problem with these is that you require an Adobe plug-in for your browser for these to operate. This means they do not work on many phones and other devices like the iPad. They also sometimes don’t port to all platforms, so if you have 64-Bit Linux, you are out of luck.
Many of our competitors have embraced Microsoft Silverlight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight). This is worse than Flash, in that there are very limited choices for where it runs and you are really limited to only running on Windows PCs in IE or on Microsoft Phones which so far haven’t been very popular.
Again we chose HTML and JavaScript because we get full device and browser independence built on open industry standards. Our competitors will claim that they chose something proprietary to give a richer client experience. This may have been true five years ago, but today even with only HTML4, you can get just as rich an experience as these other technologies. And now with HTML5 and a whole host of newer more powerful Browsers coming to market, we can now exceed the rich client experience of these other technologies without losing TCO or locking in to proprietary platforms.