Tip: Sage MAS 90 Extended Enterprise Suite License Keys Do NOT Work With a Regular MAS 90 Install Disk

I made a silly assumption this morning.

I assumed that my client, who is an existing user of Sage MAS 90, could upgrade (add a new module)  fairly quickly by using their newly acquired Extended Enterprise Suite (aka – EES) license keys with my old MAS 90 v4.3 product disk.

By way of background, my client is a long time user of Sage MAS 90. They were looking to add a few modules that they didn’t already own when I pointed out to them that they could probably save some money by upgrading to Sage EES which would contain all those modules as well as provide them with SageCRM and FAS (1,500 asset limit) for future use. The price on this upgrade was less than if they went and licensed the applications that they were thinking of purchasing.

Here’s a list of the modules included with EES (as well as some of my frequently asked questions)

http://s-consult.com/mas90-pricing/sage-extended-enterprise-suite-mas90-and-mas200-faq/

What I Learned

My first thought was that I would simply use the license keys that come with Sage EES with my regular MAS 90 v4.30 disk.

WRONG.

• The Sage EES for MAS 90 keys don’t work with your regular Sage MAS 90 product disk.
• Instead what you must do to install and use the new Sage MAS90 EES is do an ERP Server installation.
• Install Sage EES – ERP Server to a new location
• Migrate data to the new location (you CANNOT install over your old MAS 90)
• Load Service Updates and any Extended Solutions
• Verify any of the paths in your MAS 90 (ie Paperless Office) that may point to the old directory and consider changing them
• FRX did not need a “path” updated because I was running to standard SOTAMAS90 ODBC driver which is self-configured by the install
• Run workstation setup on each and every desktop so the client points to the new Sage MAS 90 EES
• If you’re going to leave the old MAS 90 on the server for a short while so that you can make sure everything is running properly with the EES installation, then consider renaming pvxwin32.exe on the OLD installation (located in /mas90/soa) to PVXWIN32.OLD. This keeps people who may have an old version of the MAS 90 client on their desktop from accidentally going into the older version and entering transactions.

PS – It took about 4 hours for me to update 5 users which included removing and re-adding workstation setup (about 15-20 minutes per desktop). This time also includes your normal “wait” time as well as the general discovery that I was not able to use my new EES keys on the general MAS 90 disk — and instead had to do an EES upgrade.

PPS – So far as I could see there was no data conversion required and I was able to load just the ERP Server (no CRM) and everything ran find on the desktops (obviously this client is not yet trying to run FAS or SageCRM or they certainly would have experienced issues trying to access those apps)