Introduction
We recently released Sage 300 2016 with Web UIs for C/S, Bank, Tax, G/L, A/R and A/P. Now we have released our first beta of the operations modules I/C, O/E and P/O. Internally we are calling this our February 2016 release, I’m not sure what it will be officially called externally yet. This release will be packaged as a Service Pack to the Sage 300 2016 version, so this will need to be installed first. This will be a pretty major Service Pack with a lot of new functionality added. But as a Service Pack, the actual internal program versions won’t change and the upgrade procedures will be the same as for a regular Service Pack.
Due to various dependencies, we needed to produce the Financial Accounting screens for the Web first. Even though most users who can really benefit from Web/Mobile access need the Operations screens. So hopefully having all these Operations screens available should open up a great many possibilities for our customers. Of course you can still use the existing Windows Desktop VB screens, and you can even use a combination of both.
You need to run the “Portal…” dialog from Database Setup again to seed some data for the operations modules into the Portal database.
New KPIs
We have new KPIs for I/C, O/E and P/O. They are in the screen shot below, namely “Top Salespersons”, “Inventory Item Performance” and “Activity Trend”. Also notice the menus for I/C, O/E and P/O have been added to the main menu bar.
Order Entry
We are really pleased to have moved Order Entry to the Web. This is a module where there are often a great many users that are located in different geographic locations, or need to use the module while on the road. This module also integrates with Sage Payment Solutions (SPS) for processing credit cards. Below is a sample showing the main Order Entry UI.
Purchase Order
Purchase Order is a pretty major module that is now in the Web. Perhaps we don’t get as many users running P/O screens as O/E screens, but for a lot of companies, the P/O process is very important. Below is a screen shot of the main P/O Purchase Order Entry screen.
Inventory Control
I/C is a large module with lots of UIs that now have Web UI versions. We haven’t moved Lot Tracking or Serialized Inventory yet, but most of the other I/C functionality is now available in the Web. Below is a screen shot of the I/C Receipts screen, which is one of the major I/C document entry screens.
Other Screens
A number of the lesser used C/S, G/L, A/P and A/R screens were omitted from the first release. Quite a few of these are now in. For instance C/S Schedules has been added along with the various recurring entry screens that use Schedule Codes.
We added a number of other screens like the G/L Fiscal Set Comparison screen.
Another thing you might notice is that the Web UIs are available in Chinese now in addition to English and French.
There will be More
This is just beta 1. It is focused on the new parts of the Web Screens. It doesn’t include the new features that will be included in the Windows Desktop version, these will be appearing in a later Beta.
Summary
With the addition of the I/C, O/E and P/O screens, Sage 300 now has a very large footprint of its functionality in the Web. Hopefully we can get lots of feedback from this Beta release and have a successful launch in February.
It may seem like we are releasing the February version pretty quickly after just releasing the main Sage 300 2016 version, but we are now looking to release three fairly major updates to the product each year. This is the result of our adoption of Agile methodologies and the use of continuous delivery techniques (to release frequently, reliably and easily). Even though this isn’t a cloud release, we can still use the techniques of cloud delivery for our on-premise customers.
