Free Video Overview

Myron Stevenson, member of the 90minds.com consulting group had recently hosted a great overview demonstration of the MAS90 and MAS200 BOI Scripting functionality which was substantially enhanced in version 4.4.

Customize Sage MAS90 and MAS200

Why is this so important?  Because for the first time, you can replace a large portion of what previously required source code modifications in MAS 90 and MAS 200 with ‘above the source code’ functionality that a training consultant or end user can use.  These functions can’t break the underlying logic of the program and can easily be upgraded.

Free Training

Also don’t forget to check out Ask90minds.com to participate in our free Question and Answer (Q&A) site.
Watch below for this free overview training to see how easy it is to taylor MAS 90 and MAS200 to your business needs

© 2011, Mark Chinsky. All rights reserved. Formed in 2005. the 90 Minds Consulting Group is a collaboration of 100 Sage partners who independently join together online in a 24 x 7 private communication network to solve difficult issues for their customers. The group is not affiliated with Sage and our collaboration provides for unparalleled member access to early warnings of bugs and other issues which members in turn are encouraged to use to provide an exceptional customer experience.

A frequent question which we all hear about Sage ERP MAS 90 is regarding speed. The question? “How can I speed up Sage ERP MAS 90 or 200. Are there any tips or tricks you can offer?”.

Here’s feedback from our 90 Minds Consulting Group regarding their experiences with fine tuning MAS 90 or MAS 200 so that it runs faster.

via Mark Chinsky – Clients First – Holmdel NJ – mchinsky@90minds.com

My tip to speed up MAS 90:

If you were used to the speed of 3.71 and just upgraded to 4.x on similar hardware/network you’ll notice a dramatic slowdown in loading various program functions. This is due to the application code growing by about 4x due to the new business framework.

MAS90 Speed Tip: Use Terminal Services

You have 3 options:

1) Upgrade or confirm that all users have a gigabit ethernet connection to the server. This may mean new network card installations in the server and/or workstations, changing existing hubs/switches to gigabit models, and making sure all related network wiring is category 5e or higher.

TIP: Prior to making any decision on hardware or operating system changes be sure to review the MAS 90 and MAS 200 Supported Operating Systems and Hardware Platforms.

2) Purchase Microsoft Terminal Services licenses for the server or add another server dedicated to Terminal Server (make sure there is a gigabit ethernet connection between the two servers if you go that route). Then setup all workstations to access MAS90 via Terminal Server. If its Terminal Server 2008 (or higher when released) you have the option to make the application look almost as if its running locally on your desktop rather than a PC desktop within your desktop. You get the added benefit of being able to access your MAS90 (with security) from anywhere in the world at high speed as well as any other network applications/database you may have. For external access, you/your IT folks may have to setup a port forwarding rule on your internet router so that remote users will get properly forwarded to the server.

3) Upgrade to MAS200. This is one of the more expensive options and does not give reliable access to remote users (who aren’t using Terminal Services). However it avoids the network bottleneck issues of MAS90 because the application runs mostly on the server and only screens and keystrokes from on the workstation using much less bandwidth. This is Sage’s official recommendation. Possibly because its the one that results in the highest revenue to them.

For MAS200, there are very few things that would make it slow unless you have a slow old server. In that case, get a new server with plenty of ram, fast RAID hard drives and a fast memory architecture. MAS200 can only use 2 cores max so buying more than that doesn’t do much for MAS200.

For MAS90 & MAS200. For crystal reports that run slowly, besides having your consultant review it for poor design, the only way to speed it up on large database is to use a guru to convert it to Access Pass Thru Queries or to move to SQL for reporting. DSD sells an affordable solution to ‘mirror’ the MAS 90 database to SQL in real time.

MAS90 Speed Tip: Exclude MAS90 Files From Virus Scans

via Robert Wood – DDF Consulting – Ocala Florida – rwood@90minds.com

First double check your anti virus settings from the list on Wayne’s site – (Sage MAS 90 or 200 version 4.x files that should be excluded from a virus scan) Make sure all of your Windows’ printers are valid printers. Having invalid printers can cause MAS 90/200 to hang intermittently.

Another printing tip is if you’re using MAS 200 use the client server ODBC driver.

Disable opportunistic locking on both the server and the workstations. Opp locks can cause as many hang ups as the anti virus settings.

Be aware of other applications running on the same server as MAS 90/200.

via: Edward Wlodarczyk

To add on to Robert’s post, from a recent case of mine: check your AV program to see when automatic updates and scans are scheduled to run, and make sure that they are set for off-hours. A client of mine recently experienced drastic slowdowns and hanging due to the AV program just checking for updates at the server.

Also, remove unnecessary and unwanted programs from the Windows Startup – why have unused programs using resources that can be allocated to the programs that you are using.

© 2011, Wayne Schulz. All rights reserved. Formed in 2005. the 90 Minds Consulting Group is a collaboration of 100 Sage partners who independently join together online in a 24 x 7 private communication network to solve difficult issues for their customers. The group is not affiliated with Sage and our collaboration provides for unparalleled member access to early warnings of bugs and other issues which members in turn are encouraged to use to provide an exceptional customer experience.

Here’s Sage’s description of Sage MAS Intelligence:

This new module empowers you to quickly and easily obtain the information required for improved operations and strategic planning. Based on the familiar Microsoft® Excel® application, the Intelligence module lets you effortlessly create reports and analyze data, improving your visibility into your organization.

Access Strategically Meaningful Information—Simply run one of the 10 out-of-the-box reports and start slicing and dicing information. If needed, customization and personalization of a template is a simple and straightforward process that can be handled by any user with the proper security access.

Boost Productivity and Save Time and Money—Intelligence eliminates manual report preparation, repetitive data extracts, and complex back-end data joins to provide you with up-to-date, accurate, and presentation-quality reports for informed decision-making.

This demo was captured late last year and features a good overview of the components of SMI as well as how it works.

Click here to view the embedded video.

via: Clients First – Sage MAS Intelligence Deep Dive

© 2011, Wayne Schulz. All rights reserved. Formed in 2005. the 90 Minds Consulting Group is a collaboration of 100 Sage partners who independently join together online in a 24 x 7 private communication network to solve difficult issues for their customers. The group is not affiliated with Sage and our collaboration provides for unparalleled member access to early warnings of bugs and other issues which members in turn are encouraged to use to provide an exceptional customer experience.

What’s the largest number of users you’ve seen on Sage ERP MAS 90 or 200? Were there any issues and if so how did you overcome them? Do you have a “rule of thumb” about the number of users that MAS 90 will support – and if so what is the magic number?

What Is The Average Number of Users that Can Run Under Sage ERP MAS 90 or MAS 200?

via Ed Wlodarczyk :

I’ve got a client with 80 users on MAS 200 – no issues at all. They are connected both via LAN and WAN in two different buildings that are across the street from one another. Largest MAS 90 I’ve seen is 20 users, again, no issues. I remember back when I first started that they pushed CS for over 20 users and 90 would handle up to 25.

via 90 Minds member Mark Chinsky – Clients First Business Solutions – Holmdel NJ, Birmingham, AL, Pleasant Hill, CA, Minneapolis, MN, Nashville, TN, Arlington, TX:

I have to imagine the 80 user site is running as an application and not a service. That’s the biggest problem is the too many files issue that relates to running as a service.

The biggest issue and the reason I typically don’t recommend either MAS over 25 users is the record locking architecture that doesn’t look like its going to change in our lifetimes.

Too many problems, especially with companies spread out over multiple states with the ‘can everybody exit the system so I can post XYZ” or whatever.

via 90 Minds Member Wayne Schulz – Schulz Consulting LLC – Glastonbury CT:

Agree with Mark – we’ve found the speed of MAS 90 really depends on concurrent users in the system as opposed to total license count.

Over about 15 concurrent users with Inventory and Order entry we’ll generally recommend MAS200.

We also have found that for any sized MAS 200 organization you have to run the server component as an application or risk freezing as the number of users in the system tends to produce random lockups as the MAS 200 server runs out of resources.

Sage publishes guidelines on changing registry options (actually I think this is Microsoft’s KB article) but I don’t go anywhere near making registry changes on a company server and many IT people don’t want to monkey with it either.
My experience is that somewhere around the 20 to 25 heavy user Sales Order / Inventory mark you run into maintenance issues on MAS 200 similar to what Mark mentions. Everyone needs to exit the system (no practical for multi-office locations).

Via Ed Wlodarczyk:

The 80 user site is running as an application, but there are no issues. This is a heavy SO user, with over 1000 invoices on a light day. Granted, of the 80 users maybe 30 are inquiry only users in the warehouse and the lab.

However, the sales staff has 25 users entering orders and invoicing all day. Accounting staff has 10-12 users, and Purchasing 5. I agree that this is the exception rather than the rule, but it works for them.

Via Dawn Anastasi:

We have one MAS 200 that has 100 users. All in one building. 20 of those users are shipping personnel. They are running a very beefy virtualized server and are running MAS 200 host as an application. They are testing the upgrade from 4.10 to 4.40 currently; they had not upgraded previously as you can imagine it’s quite an undertaking. They have generally about 2000 – 2500 invoices per day (and growing).

via 90 Minds Member Robert Wood – DDF Consulting – Ocala,FL:

We have one who is running a 50 seat MAS 200. At any given time there’s normally at least 35 people in it at a time. They’re running as an application. They have over 1,000,000 invoices a year.
They purge AR Invoice History 3 to 4 times a year.

How about you? What’s the largest number of MAS 200 (or MAS90) users you’ve run across?

© 2011, Wayne Schulz. All rights reserved. Formed in 2005. the 90 Minds Consulting Group is a collaboration of 100 Sage partners who independently join together online in a 24 x 7 private communication network to solve difficult issues for their customers. The group is not affiliated with Sage and our collaboration provides for unparalleled member access to early warnings of bugs and other issues which members in turn are encouraged to use to provide an exceptional customer experience.

Epicor Software (NASDAQ: EPIC) is a global leader delivering business software solutions to the manufacturing, distribution, retail, hospitality and services industries.

Clients First is a long time 90 Minds member and Mark Chinsky is also a qualified Sage MAS90, MAS200, MAS 500 consultant. His firm offers consulting for additional products including SAP Business One and Microsoft Dynamics Navision.

Full press release:
NJ Epicor Reseller: Clients First Business Solutions – Info

via: NJ (Holmdel) EPICOR Reseller / Consultant – Clients First

© 2010, Wayne Schulz. All rights reserved. Formed in 2005. the 90 Minds Consulting Group is a collaboration of 100 Sage partners who independently join together online in a 24 x 7 private communication network to solve difficult issues for their customers. The group is not affiliated with Sage and our collaboration provides for unparalleled member access to early warnings of bugs and other issues which members in turn are encouraged to use to provide an exceptional customer experience.

This solution embeds as an extension to excel and reports on not just financial data (like FRx) but also non financial data such as dashboards, aging reports, KPI’s etc.

See the Sage MAS90 and MAS200 new report writer that replaces FRx here.

© 2010, Mark Chinsky. All rights reserved. Formed in 2005. the 90 Minds Consulting Group is a collaboration of 100 Sage partners who independently join together online in a 24 x 7 private communication network to solve difficult issues for their customers. The group is not affiliated with Sage and our collaboration provides for unparalleled member access to early warnings of bugs and other issues which members in turn are encouraged to use to provide an exceptional customer experience.

Dim PDFPath
PDFPath = “N:\DataDocs\”

Dim PDFFile
Dim wsh
dim filesys

PDFFile =ML_ITEM_NO& “.pdf”

set wsh = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)

Set filesys = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

if filesys.FileExists(PDFPath & PDFFile) then

Return = wsh.Run (chr(34) & PDFPath & PDFFile & chr(34),1,False)
else
msgbox “File ” & PDFPath & PDFFile & ” Not Found”,, “File Not Found”

end if

© 2010, Mark Chinsky. All rights reserved. Formed in 2005. the 90 Minds Consulting Group is a collaboration of 100 Sage partners who independently join together online in a 24 x 7 private communication network to solve difficult issues for their customers. The group is not affiliated with Sage and our collaboration provides for unparalleled member access to early warnings of bugs and other issues which members in turn are encouraged to use to provide an exceptional customer experience.

Breakfast and lunch was served while attendees learned about the following topics:

• What’s new in MAS90 and MAS200 4.4
• Product update 4.4.1
• Custom Office and Customizer Scripting
• Synergistic Software’s Purchase Agent add-on
• Valogix Inventory Replenishment Solution
• The Clients First hosted backup solution.

The entire user group was recorded and edited for brevity below. I have indicated the time markets so you can jump to the section of interest. Please keep in mind, the video will start playing immediately, but you can’t jump to a section that hasn’t downloaded yet. If you want to be able to scroll through the whole video, start playing it, hit the pause button and wait for the progress bar to fully download the video.

If it is downloading too slowly (this is a high-definition video) due to a slow internet connection, we have a lower resolution version available here: watch now

© 2010, Mark Chinsky. All rights reserved. Formed in 2005. the 90 Minds Consulting Group is a collaboration of 100 Sage partners who independently join together online in a 24 x 7 private communication network to solve difficult issues for their customers. The group is not affiliated with Sage and our collaboration provides for unparalleled member access to early warnings of bugs and other issues which members in turn are encouraged to use to provide an exceptional customer experience.

It outlines via screenshots all of the new capabilities included in this service release of Sage MAS 90 and Sage MAS 200.  New features include, but not limited to:

• Enhanced searching in Cash Receipts entry.  You can even find invoices based on the serial number of an item sold on it.
• Record wire transfers in AP Check processing (doesn’t actually do the ACH file creation though)
• Setup Automatic Earnings Codes for employees in payroll
• Enhanced Purchase Controls in SO entry.  Can limit customers to only be able to buy certain items for example.
• Print Back Orders on Picking Sheets.
• Avoid Duplicate Picking Sheet Printing
• New Bin and Lot searching in the Inventory Module
• New Credit Card Encryption that is part of the new PCI-DSS regulations.
• New ability to search in Data File Display and Maintenance (Should only be used by consultants and support personnel)

This is the first drop in the plans for Sage to include normally extra charge Extended Solutions into the base product.  More should be coming over the next 2 years or so

Whats New in MAS90 + MAS200 Product Update 4.4.01

© 2010, Mark Chinsky. All rights reserved. Formed in 2005. the 90 Minds Consulting Group is a collaboration of 100 Sage partners who independently join together online in a 24 x 7 private communication network to solve difficult issues for their customers. The group is not affiliated with Sage and our collaboration provides for unparalleled member access to early warnings of bugs and other issues which members in turn are encouraged to use to provide an exceptional customer experience.

Information on Crystal Reports and Xcelsius is also included.  Both these products work well with Sage MAS90 and MAS200.  Everything is wrapped up in an entertaining and visual video and avatar presentation format.

Click HERE to go to our sub-site.

© 2010, Mark Chinsky. All rights reserved. Formed in 2005. the 90 Minds Consulting Group is a collaboration of 100 Sage partners who independently join together online in a 24 x 7 private communication network to solve difficult issues for their customers. The group is not affiliated with Sage and our collaboration provides for unparalleled member access to early warnings of bugs and other issues which members in turn are encouraged to use to provide an exceptional customer experience.