Simply 2009 comes in a couple of weeks. You should wait until then. That is the time to see if they listen to you or not; when they release a new version.

Mike,

Sorry to hear that you and your peers have decided to move to a different accounting solution for your business.

I would like to let you know that Simply Accounting 2009 will have a Linux connection manager available as a download later this month. We did in fact listen to our customers and made the decision to pursue a Linux solution for the customers impacted by our change in databases last year and the requirement for a windows server to store their data on. We are supporting RedHat Enterprise 5 and SuSE Enterprise 10. The connection manager will run on other versions of Linux, but may require modifications to the installation procedures. We will be providing a forum for our customers who are using other version of Linux to share there solutions and find answers to questions they may have regarding using the connection manager in this environment.

At Sage, we do listen to the customer and we do incorporate their feedback into our product as we develop and plan for upcoming releases of the product. It is not always possible to address issues in a current release, and sometimes not even in the next release, but we do strive to address the more common issues.

 I do hope you will try the Simply Accounting 2009 release before changing your business to a different product. If not I do wish you the best of luck with your new product and hope it will assist in your business growth.

Regards,

Alistair Ellis

Hi:   Just one question.   Knowing very well that this was a horrific problem for some users and it had been well discussed on this forum,  why did it take the people coming back almost a year later to report on what they had done before any mention of Sage deciding to support Linux in the 2009 version was mentioned on this forum.  To me that is a complete lack of concern by Sage for the frustration that customers have gone through with the 2008 update (and others in the past).  Since Sage is the one that makes this forum available for customers, why hasn't someone from Sage been more helpful in keeping the information flowing?   Rita Deering

I apologize if not communicating this sooner, but our release is literally coming out this month. We were formulating our release plans over the summer. Original idea was to take after the green guys and only allow enterprise clients to have the Linux Connection Manager. After some internal discussions, it did not make sense to us that only users on Enterprise would need this solution. You all were using Linux servers before our Enterprise product came along, therefore it seems straight forward that you are not necessarily on Enterprise and still want this solution.

We did not communicate anything to you our customers about this when we started investigating solutions, as we did not want to commit to something that we may not be able to deliver on. We were hoping to have the Linux connection manager out with the Release C of SA2008 in June, but there were complexities to be over come with the Linux environment, and we need to test internally before putting it out to the masses to be sure the changes we made to the program did not cause data issues with the databases. We needed to modify some underlying code to allow the connection manager to use the Linux version of MySQL. We had special builds from MySQL to accommodate the difference between Linux and windows environments and we needed to ensure these were going to be made available from MySQL in time for our release as well. Due to the changes in the program, the Linux connection manager will not work with the SA2008 product, just the SA2009 product and future releases.

I responded to everyone now as our business partners have now been made aware of the Linux connection manager and other product enhancements as of last week. I did not want everyone to think we did not care for your business needs or that we were not listening. We will be making our official announcements later this month outlining the other enhancements in the Simply Accounting 2009 product.

Hi again:  Nice try but it doesn't wash!   All you had to say was that you were doing your utmost to accomdate all Simply users and that you were very hopeful that the problem would be taken care of by the time you were able to do the 2009 release.  How hard would that have been?  Even if you hadn't been able to accomplish it by then at least the customers would have had a time frame to be hopeful about and could have perservered for awhile knowing that Sage cared.  You left them will the TOTAL understanding that you DID NOT CARE.    That is inexcusable in my opinion when you were indeed trying to come up with solutions.  You are dealing with companies that HAVE to take care of their books.  You are dealing with companies that have to pay bookkeepers for extraordinary down time!    And you don't think that it is important to communicate continually when you are sitting there thinking up things that you can do to change the program every year whether it needs changing or not?   There are probably millions of Simply Accounting users out there and they are not using it "just for the fun of it".  They are using it to keep track of their business records and it MUST perform properly and as they are used to.  You cannot just keep "surprising" your users.   That is arrogant in the extreme.  It is a VERY SERIOUS situation for Simply users all over the country to have to have this horrendous learning curve every year.   Have you not heard of the old saying "If it's not broke, don't fix it"?       Finally coming out and saying that now we can tell you that we have come up with a solution to the Linux problem ends up being "Too little too late" for that accounting company that was trying to get reassurances from you and got no understanding from you or no ongoing communication.  An accounting firm no less.  How could you at Sage have been so blind to their dilemma?   Just one users opinion but hey, I'm sure there are many more users out there who are the ones who use the program daily and again, hey, what do they know.       Rita Deering  

 I have one question regarding the linux installation...

 Do we absolutly need the connection manager, can we simply run our own mysql instance ? That would greatly ease any 3rd-party data integration...

I've asked for that as well during the beta and so far they have no plan for it.

 Does your Simply Keep Alive work better with 2009 ? That is, it realy keeps the DB alive ?

􀂃 Windows 2000

􀂃 Windows XP

􀂃 Windows Vista

􀂃 Windows Server 2003 R2 and 2008, and Windows Small Business Server 2003

􀂃 Linux SuSE Enterprise Server 10

􀂃 Linux Red Hat Enterprise Server 5

It works the same way. No update were made to it for some time (version 1.1).

I had a good laugh when I saw all the posts from this long-dead thread come rolling in today.  FWIW we outsourced payroll and stuck with SA 2007.

rossnick:

Do we absolutly need the connection manager, can we simply run our own mysql instance ? That would greatly ease any 3rd-party data integration...

This is just a guess, but I suspect the Connection Manager is really just a glorified license enforcer.  That it is still part of 2009 is disappointing in that I expect it will mean we will have to run and support/backup a second MySQL server instead of using the one we already have... should we decide to drink the 2009 kool-aid.  We will most certainly be sitting on the fence until the dust has settled.

 - Ben

Alistair:

My clients have been running both MySQL and Samba on on non-Linux system (Unix) and I would like to know if it is likely that we can run 2009 to there?  We never went to 2008 due to this connection manager issue but if we could get some guidance we should be able to get back in sync.

Thank you,

 David.

David,

We are still requiring the Connection Manager to connect to the database. Did some searching on the internet, and there is a Mono.NET for Unix. The Connection Manager for Linux can be downloaded from the Simply Accounting web site here. There are insturctions on setting up the CM on Linux, and you can use these as a guide to see if you can setup the CM on Unix.

We have had clients set up the CM on other Linux systems than RedHat and SuSE, and in principal the Mono.NET for Linux and the Mono.NET for Unix address the issue of allowing the CM to run on those operating systems.

HTH,

Alistair 

I've just received my Simply 2009. While I do realize that the installation instructions for Linux clearly state that it has only been tested on SuSE & Red Hat, I was just wondering if anyone had tried to install it on a Mac Server? I've spent the better part of the day trying and I've given up. I can't even get the RPM command to work. Any chance someone could create a .dmg version? Or some guidance. I'm still pretty much a newbie, but I have configured my own server, so I can do some things already.

 If you talk about Mac OS X Server, it's not compatible with Linux OS.Any binaries compiled on Linux won't run under OS X.