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
