Sage ACT! - Better handling of rapidly updating environments.

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Better handling of rapidly updating environments.

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With OS and Office upgrades, when ACT! was with Symantec, while they never supported the beta releases, they did release patches within 30-60 days of retail release.

This changed when MS released Vista and Office 2007... This wasn't an issue to most users, as the uptake of these was very slow and users saw many other products took some time to add support also.

However, the current policy caused quite a bit of pain when Microsoft released Office 2010... Not just because of the extended time (and upgrade fee) for it to be added to ACT! 2011, but because Sage kept saying there would be an "announcement" regarding ACT! 2010 support for Office 2010 for months (even after the release of ACT! 2011. I mentioned this in this blog post:
http://blog.glcomputing.com.au/2010/08/office-2010-support-with-act-by-sage.html

Many of the vendors ACT! connects to are moving to more rapid development cycles - Windows 8 due next year; Windows Server 2011 out now; Office 365 due soon; IE 9 out now; Firefox 4.0 out now and 5.0 due soon; Google Chrome; Citrix; VMWare; etc...

One of the issues with some of these is that they are auto-rolled out to users (the three browsers for example) or will be installed by default on new hardware (eg Windows and Office).

With ACT! 2012 about to go beta, and being demonstrated in a North American Roadshow, I think it's crucial that Sage management implements a plan to support upgrades for products they support in a version of ACT!. More importantly, they need to announce the policy for this publicly - either that updates won't be supported for any of these till the next major release (and users will need to make the choice to wait or look at other options); or that they may be supported, depending on the effort required. If the later, Sage must be prepared to announce the fate of each of the possible patches at (or prior) to the release of the upgraded products you integrate with.

Every ACT! add-on vendor has to test (and usually update) their products with each Sage release of ACT! ... they start testing during Sage's beta period and try to have their updated code close the the release by Sage.

I accept that some updates require to much resources to do in a patch ... when this is the case, Sage should communicate this to users before they have started rolling out updates that prevent access to the functionality of ACT! that they need.

Regards,
Mike Lazarus
ACT! Evangelist
GL Computing, Australia
http://Blog.GLComputing.com.au
http://twitter.com/GLComputing

GL Computing Facebook Page - http://www.facebook.com/GLComputing
LinkedIN ACT! Fanatics Group - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=49896

Comments

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And this will drive people to upgrade (at least browsers) faster:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13639875

Google are about to stop supporting the older ones...

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Sages’ refusal to patch ACT 2010 for Office 2010 was in my view a pure and cynical decision with the sole intension of forcing existing ACT users to upgrade to ACT 2011. The fact that an add-on vendor has been able to produce a cheap patch for ACT 2010 to work with Office 2010 proves that this was not a technical issue. No one, and I mean no one, at Sage has the guts to admit to taking the decision not to patch ACT 2010 and ACCs and resellers were not consulted or informed. Sage has badly damaged their relationship with both ACT users and the professional people who support them with the blatant refusal to support an existing product purely to force users to upgrade. I would fire the individual or people involved if it were my business without hesitation.

So now to the point that Mike was making – if Sage want to keep their ACT users and supports on side they must take responsibility for keeping the product working with the programs it integrates with for a reasonable period of time (2 years?) unless there is a specific difficulty in doing so when they have to be open and honest to the reason why.

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I don't know if 2 years is feasible - sometimes the change is too big ... but I'd want a patch or an announcement of when it will be patched or, at very least, an announcement why they can't patch it for any of these during the life of the current version.

EG: Office 2010 and ACT! 2010 (as per the link in original post) ... even the basic workaround (which was known much earlier) wasn't published till well after ACT! 2011.

Right now, ACT! for Web can't work with IE9 and has some issues with Firefox 4.0 ... to date, there is nothing in KB or from management on either:

a) Will these be fixed for the current users?

b) If so, when?

c) If not, let users know not to upgrade before they need support

I do appreciate that sometimes, a fix might require too many resources for the number of affected users to justify an urgent fix ... but nothing explains the lack of communication to inform users of these before they agree to any upgrades (especially of browsers that are usually automated)

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ACT2011 web version completely broken in IE9 is very poor.

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Yes, Joe

While this is "known" (as are some issues with Firefox 4.0/5.0) and I'd expect ACT! 2012 (due August) should address those ... it would have been nice for Sage management to actually announce this when they decided the work to patch the current version was to great.

As well, to give us some type of roadmap for how browser, Office and OS updates will be handled during the life of each release.

Just wanting some communication.

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Why can't you come up with a patch to allow Act 2010 to work with MS Office 2010?

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