Sage MAS 90 and 200 Business Intelligence Comparison

May 12, 2010 by Wayne Schulz

Sage just released a pretty helpful chart which shows the main differences between some of the most popular Business Intelligence products that companies have been using with MAS 90 and MAS 200.

As you may know Sage is preparing to release a new universal Business Intelligence product which will be used on the Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 product line.

Their current release plans indicate that this will ship in Summer 2010 as outlined in a recent announcement:

Sage MAS Intelligence will soon be introduced as the ideal FRx replacement product for Sage MAS ERP. On target to be released this summer, Sage MAS Intelligence offers powerful and easy to use graphical financial reporting capabilities to access business-critical information, and makes complex reporting easy using a new report designer. Going beyond General Ledger reporting needs, Sage MAS Intelligence will provide Business Intelligence across the entire Sage MAS ERP system, including CRM and Abra.

The products compared are:

Sage MAS Intelligence (Sage’s NEW offering scheduled for Summmer 2010)
Sage MAS 90 and 200 Business Insights Dashboard
Sage MAS 90 and 200 Business Insights Reporter

FRX
BizNet
Crystal Reports
F9

The comparisons provide for ranking a wide range of features under the categories of Data Access, Report Security, Report Delivery and Distribution, Reporting Capabilities, Sorting, Aggregation and Drill Down, Database Support Provided, Operating Systems Support and MS Office Version Support.

SageMAS Intelligence Comparison- FRX, Biznet, Alchemex, Crystal, F9

FRX to Sage MAS Intelligence Conversion Tool Is In The Works

April 12, 2010 by Wayne Schulz

We’ve already discussed that the financial reporting tool used by MAS 90 and MAS 200, Microsoft’s FRX, is reaching the end of it’s life in 2012. Sales of the product will stop in December 2010 and support ceases two years later.

The replacement for FRX is Sage MAS Intelligence. It’s a private labeled version of a spreadsheet based solution from a company named Alchemex which is already in use with Sage’s Accpac product line.>/p>

We had an opportunity in March to take a first look at what was then termed Sage Insights Intelligence (since re-branded Sage MAS Intelligence).

One of the questions at the time was about how FRX reports would be converted. Many customers who are using FRX have created elaborate FRX layouts for their financial reporting. Understandably many users have been concerned about whether all of this data would transfer to the new Sage MAS Intelligence.

While we don’t know exactly what data will be converted (for example it’s unclear whether reporting tree structures will convert), we can report that last night Alchemex shared the following welcome news:

..nothing new other than we most definitely will release a utility that will convert FRx reports in MAS Intelligence format, but are in discussions with Microsoft regarding the password for the FRx database and using this, so may have some delays, but realize how critical this process/function will be and are paying attention to it.

So it looks as if at least some older FRX layout formats have a chance for automatic conversion to the new Sage MAS Intelligence layout. It’s still too early to tell exactly what will convert (and how accurately) however it’s comforting to know that a conversion option remains under active development.

Business Insights Intelligence for MAS 90 & MAS 200 – First Look

March 15, 2010 by Wayne Schulz

Last week the Alchemex folks shared an hour long demonstration of the new Business Insights Intelligence module for Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200. As you may remember back in January 2010 we picked up on a semi-official announcement from Sage that Alchemex was MAS 90’s FRX replacement.

Microsoft, the owner of FRX, had previously announced that as of the end of 2010 all sales of FRX would cease. As of the end of 2012 all support for the MAS 90 or MAS 200 version of FRX will stop as well.

Here’s the recorded session. No firm word yet on exactly when this will release though it seems likely you’ll see the first release in the second half of 2010.

Sage Business Intelligence from Wayne Schulz on Vimeo.

Sage Announces Alchemex As Their MAS 90 MAS 200 FRX Financial Reporter Replacement

January 18, 2010 by Wayne Schulz

Sage yesterday announced on LinkedIn that Alchemex is their new reporting tool that will be bundled with MAS90/200 and serve to replace the FRX Report Writer which Microsoft is retiring in 12/2012.

It’s possible I missed a public announcement about the replacement for FRX Financial Reporting for the Sage MAS90 and MAS200 product line.

While Alchemex has been informally discussed during internal Sage Business Partner roadmap sessions – the only other indication that it was being considered was reportedly during comments public customer demonstrations made at the Sage Summit customer conference.

As we’ve discussed before, FRX is being discontinued at the end of 2012. FRX is a financial report writer bundled with MAS 90 and MAS 200 General Ledger. It has advanced capabilities (consolidations, formatting, structure) that larger companies use to create custom financial statements based on their MAS 90 or MAS 200 General Ledger data.

Microsoft owns the product and made a decision in 2008 to discontinue FRX support. The exact discontinuation schedule changed a few times until it arrived at the final end-of-life date of December 2012.

This means that all software publishers (including Sage) who offered FRX as their primary financial reporting tool needed to either write their own financial reporting package or scramble to find a suitable replacement in advance of the 2012 deadline.

There had been some informal indicationis that Alchmex, an Excel-based reporting tool, would be the replacement. This program is already used in the Accpac, Sage ERP X3 product lines to create financial reports.

Until now I have not seen any public announcement to users or the Sage channel about the use of Alchemex as the replacement for FRX .

Confirmation of the Alchemex use in MAS 90 and MAS 200 appears to be all but confirmed by today’s statement on the MAS90 LinkedIn Group by Erik Kaas, Director of Product Management at Sage Software who states that users should expect to see the first MAS 90 and MAS 200 compatible version in Summer 2010 :

Microsoft has announced an end of support date of December 31, 2012 for FRx. This summer, Sage will start shipping “Business insights Intelligence” as an alternative solution for Financial Reporting within our Sage MAS products. Sage has established an OEM relationship with a business intelligence (BI) vendor (Alchemex) that offers advanced financial reporting, operational reporting, and advanced OLAP analysis capabilities. Sage MAS customers will be provided with one free user license for this product with the option of purchasing additional licenses. This solution will provide robust financial reporting out of the box and will complement the already very strong tools in Sage MAS, including Business Insights Explorer and Dashboard. Sage will also ensure that the next releases of MAS 90 will continue to be backward compatible with FRx Desktop.

Note that FRx Forecaster has been discontinued by Microsoft and is no longer available for sale. It will continue to be supported directly by Microsoft through September 30, 2010.

Update January 18, 2010: According to Sage every MAS90/200 user will get 1 free license as part of the MAS 90 v4.4 Product Update. In addition, they are reviewing a “trade in” program to allow customers that have purchased additional FRx licenses to exchange them for equivalent BI Intelligence licenses.

Sage is investigating if and how custom FRx reports can be converted to the new format and we will make a utility available to assist with the conversion. However, since FRx is a proprietary format it is unlikely that the utility will be perfect – but it should minimize the costs of conversion.

This is the second time a major announcement has debuted on the Sage MAS90 LinkedIn group. The first announcement was earlier this month when Sage stated they would support MAS90/200 v4.3 on Windows 7 with the expected release of Service Update 18 in March 2010.

Alchemex via: LinkedIn

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