Sage Line 50 : Quick, Quick, Slow?

Performance seems to be a common problem in Sage Line 50.

I think it's fair to say that some operations are slow, particularly when there are lots of transactions on the system, but equally I'm not convinced, unlike some commentators, that network configuration is not a significant factor. It's also kind of interesting to compare Sage running on an old Win98 box and an all singing and dancing XP box accessing data files on the same server.

It's quite possible that Sage haven't taken the time to test some of the issues in a controlled environment, but we have and significant performance gains are available for relatively little effort.

For example, using a unc path to the Sage data files rather than a mapped drive letter can reduce performance by 50%.

Similiarly Norton AV on the Sage dta files will grind Sage to a halt.

Turn off Opportunistic Locking on the client or server. There are lots of Microsoft Knowledge Base Articles on this subject.

There are another couple of Windows Server Policy settings that have dramatic effects on scrolling through lists of Invoices for example and the speed of reporting but I'm not going to list them here because a) We need to make a living and b) You run the risk of messing up your system if you don't know what you are doing.

You will still need to extract data for some operations because, yes, Sage uses an old architecture and some fields aren't indexed

Sage Line 50 Solution Selling

Having read a few Sage related blogs quite by accident I thought I might as well have a go myself.

A lot of the comment I have seen related to Line 50 seems to miss the basic point that all services / solutions related to a Sage sale (or anything else for that matter) are directly proportional to the price of the product being sold.

If someone buys a £5000 car they aren't going to expect (or pay) the sort of service bills you get for a £30,000 car. Exactly the same principle applies to the computer industry, so, if you want to make more money, start selling a more expensive solution.