Sage Line 200 vs Opera II

[P4554T]

Right Business minds ...

We are currently running Opera for Windows (I know I know it is very old) and we are looking at upgrading.

Our existing IT supplier is suggesting Line 200 but another company today were offering Opera II.

I can see benefits to both:

Sage - indusry standard, less training for new employees etc.
Opera II - easy upgrade, less cost, less training for existing employees.

I will be needing: SOP, Financials, Nominal, Purchase, Stock, Payroll, CRM, Multi-currency.

Both would be customised to reduce other forms and stuff we currently use.

Anyone using either, recommend either etc?

I am leaning towards Opera, but wanted some real world experience.

[clarkey]

Is it Sage Line 200 or Sage 200? Very different products.

[sam.r]

We use Opera I and thought we must be the only company left still using it. God its old!

We are in a similar situation. Are you having problems with opera I?

Sorry thats not much help is it!

[P4554T]

Sage Line 200 ... with the CRM aspect. Company wide software ist the "buzz word" isn't?

Opera I ... hhmm ... not as such problems, but computers with Vista have problems, my two refuse point blankly ... We are upgrading our server too so now is the time, especially as we will have Exchange and SQL so ideal time to look.

[plasticpig]

P4554T said:

Sage Line 200 ... with the CRM aspect. Company wide software ist the "buzz word" isn't?

Opera I ... hhmm ... not as such problems, but computers with Vista have problems, my two refuse point blankly ... We are upgrading our server too so now is the time, especially as we will have Exchange and SQL so ideal time to look.

I am not sure how anyone can sell you Sage Line 200. It was withdrawn from the Sage portfolio two years ago. It does not appear on the Sage website as a product. IIRC Line 200 was a cut down version of 500 and Sage incoporated Line 200 pricing into 500.

As for choosing between the two. You need to choose the best fit for your company. How much customisation does each require to fit in with your Business Process Management.

[P4554T]

plasticpig said:

P4554T said:

Sage Line 200 ... with the CRM aspect. Company wide software ist the "buzz word" isn't?

Opera I ... hhmm ... not as such problems, but computers with Vista have problems, my two refuse point blankly ... We are upgrading our server too so now is the time, especially as we will have Exchange and SQL so ideal time to look.

I am not sure how anyone can sell you Sage Line 200. It was withdrawn from the Sage portfolio two years ago. It does not appear on the Sage website as a product. IIRC Line 200 was a cut down version of 500 and Sage incoporated Line 200 pricing into 500.

As for choosing between the two. You need to choose the best fit for your company. How much customisation does each require to fit in with your Business Process Management.

It is probably me being wrong then in that case.

We haven't seen a demo of Sage yet, later this month in fact, but Opera II won't require too much by the looks of it. The changes that we will require are simple dropping fields, adding tabs, that sort of thing. The aim is to reduce the use of any other files and forms outside of Opera II. I imagine that Sage would be similar?

In Opera II, I liked the fact that we will have custom built stock records, with technical details, with technical drawing already in the document management system. Saves time, and keep everything all together.

[sam.r]

P4554T said:

plasticpig said:

P4554T said:

Sage Line 200 ... with the CRM aspect. Company wide software ist the "buzz word" isn't?

Opera I ... hhmm ... not as such problems, but computers with Vista have problems, my two refuse point blankly ... We are upgrading our server too so now is the time, especially as we will have Exchange and SQL so ideal time to look.

I am not sure how anyone can sell you Sage Line 200. It was withdrawn from the Sage portfolio two years ago. It does not appear on the Sage website as a product. IIRC Line 200 was a cut down version of 500 and Sage incoporated Line 200 pricing into 500.

As for choosing between the two. You need to choose the best fit for your company. How much customisation does each require to fit in with your Business Process Management.

It is probably me being wrong then in that case.

We haven't seen a demo of Sage yet, later this month in fact, but Opera II won't require too much by the looks of it. The changes that we will require are simple dropping fields, adding tabs, that sort of thing. The aim is to reduce the use of any other files and forms outside of Opera II. I imagine that Sage would be similar?

In Opera II, I liked the fact that we will have custom built stock records, with technical details, with technical drawing already in the document management system. Saves time, and keep everything all together.

Would you mind emailing me through PH who you are buying from and have support with? We are thinking about Opera II and want to get the best price if possible.

[P4554T]

Sam, YHM.

[plasticpig]

P4554T said:

plasticpig said:

P4554T said:

Sage Line 200 ... with the CRM aspect. Company wide software ist the "buzz word" isn't?

Opera I ... hhmm ... not as such problems, but computers with Vista have problems, my two refuse point blankly ... We are upgrading our server too so now is the time, especially as we will have Exchange and SQL so ideal time to look.

I am not sure how anyone can sell you Sage Line 200. It was withdrawn from the Sage portfolio two years ago. It does not appear on the Sage website as a product. IIRC Line 200 was a cut down version of 500 and Sage incoporated Line 200 pricing into 500.

As for choosing between the two. You need to choose the best fit for your company. How much customisation does each require to fit in with your Business Process Management.

It is probably me being wrong then in that case.

We haven't seen a demo of Sage yet, later this month in fact, but Opera II won't require too much by the looks of it. The changes that we will require are simple dropping fields, adding tabs, that sort of thing. The aim is to reduce the use of any other files and forms outside of Opera II. I imagine that Sage would be similar?

In Opera II, I liked the fact that we will have custom built stock records, with technical details, with technical drawing already in the document management system. Saves time, and keep everything all together.

It depends how far you need to go with the customisation. I havent done any Opera II development for quite a while but IIRC you can add fields to screens etc but adding tabs might be more of an issue. Another consideration about buying Opera II is that it may not run on future MS OS platforms. The development language it is developed in is being phased out.

[P4554T]

Well, we will be on either 2003 or 2007 server and plan to have it for quite a while on a brand new server, so no problems there.

Custimisation won't be too intense, a little bit here etc.

We are demo'ng Sage at the end of the month to compare.

[Digga]

plasticpig said:

Another consideration about buying Opera II is that it may not run on future MS OS platforms. The development language it is developed in is being phased out.

We've just upgraded from Opera II to the SQL version - so this is (theoretically) a future beyond 'II, but we are experiencing a number of issues which would lead us to assume there are not many Opera SQL users out there yet.

As an aside, and probably of relevance to the general discussion is what number of users people expect to have on their system. I was always lead to beleive (and this could well be bcks) that Sage didn't work too well if you had lots of users entering data nd processing orders and invoices. Which I suppose begs the question, if not Sage or Opera, trhen what else is there to consider.

Please don't say SAP, please don;t say SAP.....

[CR0X]

We will have SBS Premium so might as well make the most of SQL, which will also allow more third party apps to be installed.

We will be demo'ng Sage next week so will be interesting to see how it compares. Though to be honest, Opera II looks good, especially there be little re-training to get it up and running to same standards as Opera I, whereas Sage will require quite a bit more training.

[Digga]

Tim,

How many users to you tend to have on the system at one time?

At any one time, we have up to 11 sales and accounts people - generating orders, delivery notes, invoices etc. and also handling the purchase ledger - and Opera has generally been stable, but I wonder what companies do when they're talking in multiples of tens in terms of users?

IMHO, SQL does not (yet) seem quite as good as II, but it's early days yet. There's a few speed issues that need to be addressed.

[plasticpig]

Digga said:

plastic pig said:

Another consideration about buying Opera II is that it may not run on future MS OS platforms. The development language it is developed in is being phased out.

We've just upgraded from Opera II to the SQL version - so this is (theoretically) a future beyond 'II, but we are experiencing a number of issues which would lead us to assume there are not many Opera SQL users out there yet.

As an aside, and probably of relevance to the general discussion is what number of users people expect to have on their system. I was always lead to believe (and this could well be bcds) that Sage didn't work too well if you had lots of users entering data nd processing orders and invoices. Which I suppose begs the question, if not Sage or Opera, then what else is there to consider.

Please don't say SAP, please don;t say SAP.....

Well my company while not a direct competitor to Pegasus uses the same non server development system (Microsoft Visual Foxpro) and we do an accounting software package. Our package quite happily supports 50 simultaneous users. I used to do a lot of work on Pegasus Opera projects and that would certainly support 50 users with no problems. Remember this is without using SQL server or MYSQL what have you.

[Digga]

plasticpig said:

Well my company while not a direct competitor to Pegasus uses the same non server development system (Microsoft Visual Foxpro) and we do an accounting software package. Our package quite happily supports 50 simultaneous users. I used to do a lot of work on Pegasus Opera projects and that would certainly support 50 users with no problems. Remember this is without using SQL server or MYSQL what have you.

I though that when we moved from Invisible Fox Poo to SQL, the system should theoretically be quicker, because of the way data is shared. But it aint, yet. I'm sure I remember that being one of the (verbal) enticements used by the reseller!

[plasticpig]

Digga said:

plasticpig said:

Well my company while not a direct competitor to Pegasus uses the same non server development system (Microsoft Visual Foxpro) and we do an accounting software package. Our package quite happily supports 50 simultaneous users. I used to do a lot of work on Pegasus Opera projects and that would certainly support 50 users with no problems. Remember this is without using SQL server or MYSQL what have you.

I though that when we moved from Invisible Fox Poo to SQL, the system should theoretically be quicker, because of the way data is shared. But it aint, yet. I'm sure I remember that being one of the (verbal) enticements used by the reseller!

You have been had! Its not as simple as saying one is faster than the other. I could quite happily develop a system in Fox for 10 users that would beat a properly written SQL server version into the ground in terms of performance. Make the system 100 users and I may start to struggle.
The breakpoint between the two varies but up to 25 simultaneous users then Foxpro is generally quicker but the mileage varies depending up the application.

[Digga]

I had a feeling we were being used as crash test dummies, although to be fair, there are other elements which drove us towards SQL.

Looking on the bright side though, if we were only to increase the scale of our business by a factor of about 500% this year, the SQL decision is a no brainer.