You may know that you can email one contact or multiple contacts and merge the data with an email template from with-in Saleslogix. But, if you want to really market your customers and prospects, Swiftpage offers an excellent tool. It provides data on reads, opens, and unique opens, provides templates, allows you to edit templates, and provides opt out services as well. The fee is based on how many emails that you send a month. Check out www.swiftpage.com for more information.

You may not be aware, but AvaTax (from Avalara) is a web based interface that virtually takes care of all of your sales taxes. It is completely integrated with Sage MAS 90, 200, and 500 ERP. You can post only taxable, only non-taxable, or all invoices to the program, and all sales tax rates are handled outside of your accounting software. For a small additional fee, the company will even file sales tax returns. It is completely worth looking at.

The new ACT Link works great and is very streamlined. The data that the user sees from MAS 90 includes very important accounting data and sales history, which previously could not be viewed. The only downside is that it is very quirky with the installation. The link gets installed on each workstation (only at the server if you want to use ACT from the server).

Many people I am sure are confused as to why their existing enhancements are taking so long to ugprade. Essentially, Sage went to what is called “object oriented programming” with level 4.X. This is as large a change as when DOS went to Windows. Senior Programmers have instantly become Junior Programmers. Each and every enhancement has to be rewritten in a language that most programmers have to learn from scratch. The programs have to be rewritten as the module gets adapted to OOP. For example, when Sales Order changed to 4.10, then all enhancements that affect Sales Order have to be rewritten at that time.

If you would like MAS 500 to bypass the MAS 500 user login screen, go to Start/Programs/Sage Software/Utilities, and look for the Client Configurator - you can change the program to use windows authentication by user or for all users.