Product Management Update

Are you the Sage customer who will be our next winner? Nominations and applications are now being accepted for the Second Annual Sage Customer Awards Program. This program is a great opportunity for customers like you to be truly recognized for your outstanding achievements.  Last year's program was a great success and this year is primed to be even better.  Check out the 2008 Sage Customer Awards Winners brochure. This year it could be your turn.  We will be crowning winners in each of the following six award categories this November at Sage Summit.

• Innovation
• Rookie of the Year
• Best End-to-End Deployment
• Best Use of Customization
• Community Stewardship
• Lifetime Achievement

 Bragging rights aren't enough?  Well, we have some other great benefits in store for our 2009 award winners as well, including:

• Free registration to this year's Sage Summit customer conference in November
• Two complimentary nights hotel accommodations at Sage Summit
• Special VIP access at Sage Summit
• Crystal trophy recognizing your outstanding achievement

 Don't delay your entries!  The deadline for submitting applications is August 31, 2009. If you have any questions on the program or the application process, feel free to email Scott White at customer.awards@sage.com.

2011. Its still a couple years away, but for publicly accountable entities in Canada it marks the beginning of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). For companies in the U.S. the timeline is still unclear, it could be as early as 2014 or possibly even 2016, either way there’s more breathing room if you have to report to the SEC. Business in other parts of the world such as Australia, the European Union and Singapore moved much earlier to IFRS – 2005 in the case of the european Union. The transition from GAAP to IFRS will touch on many areas of a business including accounting policies, business processes and of course your accounting software.  Sage Accpac customers in these countries made the switch to IFRS and relied on Accpac’s flexibility and features to meet their reporting needs. In the next series of articles we’ll take a deeper dive into this topic to see what companies are doing. In the meantime if you have any questions we'll like to hear from you.

As part of our commitment to being truly transparent in our dealings with our business partners and customers, I feel it is important to inform you of some reports we’ve received from customers when using the new Dashboard feature included with Sage Accpac ERP 5.5.

Summary of issues:

The installation process is pretty seamless, but the first time dashboards are used, one of 2 things may happen:

1. Error 404 (Page cannot be displayed) or other security related messages
2. No company appears in the drop down menu of the Logon box

Issue one (1) is mostly due to the complexity of creating Permission settings for an “IIS process user”. A Knowledge base article has been created for it (click here to read)
 
Issue two (2) - this issue will come up for dashboard users on busy production servers where memory is always a constraint.
 
The Support team is able to walk users through a series of steps in order to do a proper diagnostic, and fix the issue - if you or your customers experience this issue, please contact our support team for assistance.

The two problems with this solution are:

• It involved changing a value in the “Boot.ini” file of the server, which some people may be reluctant to do
• It is temporary, and very short term – only by addressing the bigger issue of how Accpac is designed will we solve it permanently

We have also received reports of performance being slow when using Accpac Dashboards:

Example of poor performance: on a 40 gig database, the dashboard times out after 2 hours. We have been able to improve this by as much as five times faster - it’s not as fast as we want it to be, but it’s a bit more realistic…our support team will soon be able to provide the performance improvements via a hotfix for those who need it.
I would much rather be writing about something positive, but I think you can appreciate the need to be up-front about this. Rest assured that we are working very hard to solve these in a sustainable way – and I’ll be happy to let you know as soon as we’re ready. The timeline is still unknown, but it is a priority for us to solve this ASAP.

On a related topic, we have decided to hold off shipping the Dashboard Customization Toolkit (that lets users create and modify dashboards using Business Object’s Xcelcius) until we resolve these issues.

Comments and feedback are of course welcome.
Regards,
Hugo

Sorry for the long time since my last update – I’m going to blame the madness that sweeps this office in the weeks leading up to Insights…those of you who don’t know, Sage Insights is the annual Business Partner conference. It’s a very large event which combines all of Sage Software’s products for North America. This year, the conference was held at the newly completed Gaylord Hotel in Washington DC. Accpac’s delegation was the largest for a single product, which made for a very exciting conference.

The general theme of the event can be summarized by these words: “We’re listening”. From the Accpac Keynote address, the tone was set for a very positive launch of Accpac 5.5, where Laurie Schultz (GM), Scott Zandbergen (VP of Product Management) and Rob King (VP of Strategic Marketing) reviewed what we had heard at the previous year’s conference, and how we had delivered – simplified product line, simplified pricing, single point of contact for CRM and Accpac, no more “nickel and diming” on option products that should be part of the core, etc. I know this sounds like a lot of corporate propaganda, so I hope that those of you who read this, and were present at the keynote can confirm in the comments that the atmosphere was very candid – it wasn’t all “rah-rah we’re great” but rather a continuation of our commitment to being customer connected, and market driven. The goal was to share with the crowd the level of confidence we have in this release. We did have a bit of “rah-rah” with AC/DC music and a t-shirt gun at the end, and to be honest, that was a blast, and the t-shirt is pretty cool, looking like a rock concert t-shirt, with the slogan “Accpac is Back!” (white letters on black t-shirt).

After we got to communicate how we delivered on our commitments, it was time to get back to listening mode. There were two “ask the Accpac Executives” sessions, and both were really well attended. Those sessions are very high energy, with Laurie setting the tone with her trademark candid, no nonsense style. Laurie was supported by Scott Z, Rob K, David Lahey (VP sales), Sean Fleming (Director of training and education) and Steve Leow (VP of R&D). The topics were very diverse, and the participation from all the partners was outstanding – I said it before, and I’ll say it again, it is a privilege to have a Business Partner community willing to tell it like it is – we need to hear this stuff…

This was my first Insights conference, and it was great to meet so many of our business partners. I had 4 sessions, and the one I was looking forward to delivering the most was “The Impact of Customer Connected Development on 5.6”. This was my vehicle to explain what Product Management brings to the table – from concrete and measurable market data and evidence priorities are identified, and those priorities are then turned into actual requirements that drive the product development. I outlined the key features being explored for 5.6, and while I won’t disclose them on this blog, if you’re interested, feel free to send me a message, we can chat about it. The core message was this: Technology shouldn’t drive our development efforts - The market dictates where we go from here, we’ll figure out the technology we need to make it happen.

This is actually a good segue for me to ask for a favor…I work very closely with a small group of Accpac Business Partners to get quick feedback on issues, requirements, design concepts, etc as we go through the development process. Because I respect your time and your privacy, I wouldn’t feel right sending random questions, and feedback requests by email, or picking up the phone for a quick chat unless I had explicit permission to do so…if you would like to help me as we work on our next versions, please let me know (contact me via this blog) and I will add you to my list of “go-to” people – remember, if you’re too busy to chat, or to reply to my emails, no worries, no pressure.

Below are some of the top priorities I got from listening to your feedback – in no particular order:
• Software Performance (this is a mix of processing speed, data entry speed, and reporting speed)
• Business Intelligence/dashboards/reporting
• Workflow
• Capacity/staffing
• Competitive intelligence wanted

I know there are a lot of things we can work on, but it helps to set a short list of “top 5” and knock them out of the park…feel free to share in the comments if you agree or not on the above priorities.

Cheers,
Hugo Croft-Levesque
Senior Product Manager
Sage Accpac ERP

PS. I didn't talk about all the fun I had hanging out with the partners at the event night, and late (very late) after that in the sports bar...some of what happens at Insights should stay at Insights...;)

To a lot of people, software development is a bit of a mystery – how are new features decided? Who picks which feature is more important than another? Well, in our company, our customers decide.

The role of a Product Manager can be summarized as "the voice of the customer to our development team". At Sage Software, we’re fortunate – we have a lot of users who rely on our solutions to manage their business. Because what we do affects people’s businesses, feedback is very easy to come by. We get tons of emails, faxes, letters – not to mention detailed suggestion from our in-product survey (yes, we do read every single comment, so keep’em coming!). We also go out and visit customers, and get even more feedback that way.

What do we do with all this information? We track it in a centralized location; our customers and partners help us assign rankings, categories, etc. Then, we prioritize it based on a few factors (such as popularity, changing regulations, strategic direction, and many more).

The biggest challenge is distilling all the information we receive into clear and concise problems – once we have correctly identified the problem, we always validate with the customers who first suggested the idea to make sure we’ve identified the right problem. Once we have a clear problem statement, and clear customer requirements, our engineers take over and design a solution – before we start even writing a single line of code, we then go back to our customers, and show them a paper based prototype solution to make sure we’re still on track. After a few iterations, once we’re 100% on the mark, we implement the feature, and voila!

Tune in regularly for more details on current development projects, my findings, and some random thoughts on software development from the product manager's point of view.

Hugo