Heinemann/Pearson/Longman Primary School Software available here with Norton Anti Virus and Windows XP, Vista and Server editions. Popular brands such as CORSAIR, D-LINK and EPSON are also included.
The main problems outlined below and found at Web Link
Slow performance Problems experienced included waiting 10-20secs for the New/Edit Customer command to respond and for saves to take place. One user said it took them three minutes to get into the Invoicing module; another added that it took even longer to respond if more than one user is in the same module. Data checking proved impossible for another user who found the system hung up when they tried to do so. In a couple of instances, the Bank Rec module was particularly slow.
Data corruption Two users started experiencing “split” errors where only one side of a transaction appeared in the journals. And some postings appeared in duplicate. One user found that four recurring entries had duplicated themselves and another found that a week after upgrading another 300+ lines of data had gone missing.
Anti-virus conflicts In some cases identified by Blencowe, anti-virus software (particularly Norton’s) slows Sage 50 Accounts. Anti-virus software works by monitoring activity on the PC and this can interfere when the accounting application writes to its data files, commented Sage. Other AV tools will also check for activity across the network.
Sage 50 Accounts database Some of the operational issues within Sage - a practical maximum of 100,000 records and the customer database issue already mentioned – are down to the product’s design, which is based on an old, proprietary flat-file database. Information from Sage’s own support staff suggests that these problems will go away when the product is migrated to a SQL-based relational database management system, either the open-source MySQL system, or Microsoft’s popular SQL Server database.
