Stephen Smith
As most, if not all, are aware, Stephen Smith, Sage 300 Enterprise Architect, retired at the end of February, 2016.
I want to acknowledge Stephen’s leadership, mentoring, friendship, his knowledge of the Sage 300 product, technologies and the accounting industry. These qualities and attributes will be missed by all at Sage. Stephen was at Sage (and Computer Associates) for over 22 years and has certainly…
Hand in hand with true HTML/JavaScript/CSS Web UI’s you also want to access the same logic from other general programs using RESTful Web Services. This gives a general API to access the application which doesn’t require any Sage 300 components be installed on the client computer and doesn’t require the calling application be on the same computer or even at the same location.
…In the Sage 300 VB UIs, a user would do something in the UI (press a button or tab out of a field) and then the VB UI would be notified of this and would possibly execute a number of Sage 300 Business Logic (View) calls and based on their results update various other fields and possibly provide user feedback via a message box.
In the Web UIs we want to do similar processing since we want to re-use the tried…
When two computers communicate they use a well-defined communications protocol. In Browser to Server communications these are often broadly categorized as either stateless or stateful. A stateless communications protocol doesn’t require that anything be remembered between calls. In web applications this is desirable for a number of reasons:
The grid or table control is a key element for data entry in any Accounting application. With Sage 300 we use the grid control to enter things like Order or Invoice details. Interactions with a grid control tend to be quite complex. The data has to be managed so it is loaded only a page at a time (often called virtual scrolling), since there could be thousands of detail lines and loading them all at once…
We’ve been talking about how to develop Web UIs using our beta SDK. But so far we’ve only been running these in Visual Studio, we haven’t talked about how to deploy them in a production system. With this article we’ll discuss how to add your menus to the home page. Which files need to be installed where and a few configuration notes to observe.
We’ll continue playing with Project and…
Last week we talked about adding UI controls to our Web UI project. In the early days of the Web, this would be all you needed to do. The user would just enter the data and hit save (or submit). However modern Web applications are expected to be more responsive and interactive. This is achieved by adding JavaScript code which can perform local processing or make calls to the server for additional data or…
In my last posting I showed how to quickly create an empty Sage 300 Web UI by running our two new wizards from Visual Studio. In this article we’ll look at how to add some visual controls to this project and talk a bit about some of the issues with doing this, namely about using our provided HTML helper functions and CSS styling.
We’re basically going to continue on and add the visual elements for the…
Sage 300 has always provided an SDK to allow ISVs to create accounting applications in the same way that we create our own applications like General Ledger or Order Entry. In the past our internal application developers have usually only had the SDK installed for doing their own work.
Further these ISVs can install their applications into a working Sage 300 installation by just copying a specific set of folders…
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…
Introduction
We often receive RFPs (Request for Proposals) that demand a firm committed five year product roadmap. Similarly we are often criticized for not having such a “golden” roadmap when other competing products have. Having now worked in an Agile world for some time now, these requests seem stranger and stranger.
The quibble here isn’t with having a plan, it’s with the inflexibility these requests imply…
Introduction
At Sage Summit 2015 we introduced our new Web UIs for Sage 300. I’ve blogged a bit on the various user facing parts and a bit on the technologies used, but I haven’t had a chance yet to get into the internals of how they work. We’ve released the Web UIs for the Financial Modules and will be releasing the Operations Modules early in 2016. With these we will be releasing our SDK as well. Over…
Introduction
We are just rolling out Sage 300 2016 which includes Web versions of Common Services, Bank Services, Tax Services, General Ledger, Accounts Receivables and Accounts Payables. The focus of this release isn’t on a new flashy portal with flashy KPIs (although we do have those) or other new technology enabled functionality. The focus is on the core Financial Accounting functionality; on entering financial…
Introduction
Sage 300 has always been an international product that is used in many countries around the world. This includes releasing the product in multiple languages, supporting multi-currency, supporting regional settings for things like dates and having flexible configurations for things like sales taxes. As part of the new Web UIs we’ve also carried through all these features into the world of the Web browser.…
Introduction
With the Web UIs in Sage 300c rolling out in a couple of weeks, there is a lot of interest in the SDK and how to develop for this platform. We are still putting together the SDK, but in the meantime you can learn the technologies that are involved in developing our new Web UIs. Generally we’ve used off the shelf components both commercial and open source to develop our new UI framework. The good thing about…
Introduction
As part of developing all the Web Screens for our upcoming Sage 300 2016 release, we worked with quite a few contractors at Sonata in Bengaluru, India. I originally visited them back in November 2014 and wrote a series of three blog articles on my experiences over there (part 1, part 2 and part 3). I then visited them again in March 2015, but didn’t blog about that visit. Now I’m in Bengaluru again and thought…
Introduction
The new Sage 300 Home Page provides a nice launching point for running your new Web based Sage 300 Accounting screens. It also provides a Home view where you can choose to display up to six KPIs out of a palette of twelve.
The twelve KPIs give a good selection of things from G/L, A/R and A/P since these are the accounting screens we are including with the first release. Then there will be more KPIs with…
Introduction
In this article I’m going into a bit more detail on the features in the Home Page for our new Sage 300 Web UIs. This is basically the launching point for our web accounting screens as well as provides a number of KPIs and user assistance.
We are calling this a Home Page rather than a Portal to avoid confusion with the 6.0A Portal, the Partner Portal and all sorts of other Portals. This isn’t meant to…
Introduction
I introduced our new Sage 300 Web UIs, talked about installing them and then discussed security implications. Now the question is that you have hundreds of users and things are starting to run quite slowly, what do you do? Similarly suppose you are all happily using the Web UIs and the web server hardware breaks down or Windows Update kicks in or Windows fails for some other reason? These two problems are…
Introduction
Sage 300 2016 comes with new Web UIs. With beta release I talked about how to install these, but I didn’t get into the details of securing your setup to be exposed to the Internet. If you just follow the instructions from the last blog post, then you are ok in a protected LAN environment, but need a number of additional steps to go beyond that. A common question is how I set this up in a secure manner so…
Introduction
In my last post I introduced the new Web UIs for Sage 300. This blog post is on installing the new Web UIs for Sage 300. The product has just gone to beta so I thought it might be helpful to provide a few details on the installation process. I also included details about some rough edges in the beta installation. I’ll update this article as we go along with any problems encountered and helpful workarounds…
Introduction
Probably one of Sage’s worst kept secrets is that we’ve been working on a true Web version of Sage 300. Now finally at Sage Summit 2015 the cat is out of the bag and the product is officially announced as Sage 300c. You can see the announcement in this video.
We will be including Web UIs for G/L, A/P, A/R, Bank, Tax, C/S and A/S screens in the upcoming Sage 300 2016 release which is slated for…
Introduction
This article doesn’t have anything to do with ERP software or programming practices. I received a drone for my birthday this year and this posting is about my drone. My drone is a DJI Phantom 2 Vision+. Basically it’s a flying camera that can take still photos or videos. Its easy to fly and can do some quite amazing things.
Privacy
A lot of people are against drones because of privacy concerns…
Introduction
The original Star Trek came out in 1966 when I was only six years old. It only ran for three seasons but had a great influence on so many people. Leonard Nimoy lived a long life and did many things; but, to many of us he is still and will always be Mr. Spock. I think I spent my entire childhood watching the original Star Trek, first the original series and then over and over again in repeats.
I’m amazed…
Introduction
Last week we discussed avoiding table scans when using the Sage 300 ERP APIs. This week we are going to look at some other issues to do with updating data and with processing meta-data.
Last week I showed a cheetah running as an example of performance and speed (the fastest land animal), but this week here she is resting and getting some attention.
AOM/UI Info/ViewDoc
First, just if you are wondering…
