E-News From The Suntower Volume IV, #12

A Belated Happy Anniversary Suntower Systems!
Seventeen years and three Red Wing Stanley Cups ago, Suntower Systems was born. OK, Honest Abe said it better. But from our humble beginnings (like many of you, we had delusions of controlling our own destiny and so went into business for ourselves!) we have now grown into three offices and over thirty full time employees. Who'd have thunk it? Now software companies come and software companies go. So why are we still around. Why you of course!

Therefore, to thank all our customers for their support over the years, we have a special idea in mind: no it's not a free golf vacation for 'one lucky winner' (ed. note: speak for yourself, Ciarān) and it's not any our previous ad spec ideas (all of which you've seen over and over) such as special printer's rulers, t-shirts, calendars, solar powered calculators, et al. No, hopefully this is something a bit more practical (and of benefit to more all of you!). What we propose is this:

Effective immediately, your business will receive a credit equal to $100 for every year you've been a registered user of Simple Accounting. Use it as you will. At the least, it will buy your company a custom report that might shave an hour or two off a particular clerical task every month (and how much is that worth). At most (and you know who you are, you swell people!) it might pay for an entire year's with of technical support or a SAFExtensions module (like the very cool PDFExtensions which let you print or e-mail any SAFE Report or Form directly to an Acrobat PDF).

Wherever you fall within the spectrum of SAFE longevity, please accept this as a token of our appreciation. Thanks, and, as they say, 'Many More!'

Preparing For SAFE 6.0?
What are you talking about? Haven't we had enough updates, upgrades, fixes, patches, rollouts, and general fooling around to last another year? Well, yes and no. As JC says: 'We'll make you all a deal: we'll stop working on SAFE when everyone agrees it's fully baked.' For many of you it's as done as you need it to be.But for others, new features can't come fast enough! So how to balance the needs wants and desires of 490 (at last count) businesses, representing over 2,000 separate offices and over 10,000 actual 'users' (people who spend a significant part of their day at the controls of SAFE, ThinSAFE or WebSAFE)? The answer is, of course, carefully.

One of the ways we try to manage this is to invite as wide a swath of customers into the beta-testing pool as possible. This is the best way to get the features you want, because, hey, if you're willing to help us test, frankly, your needs take precedence. You demonstrate, in a very tangible way, how important SAFE is to your operations, so you have our ears.

THE LONG VIEW
But for those of you who are not part of this program, it is important to have a sense of the long-term direction of our software. The idea of a long-term strategy may be alien to many of you, but since we come from a main-frame background, writing truly mission critical apps, this is second-nature to us. The idea is SIMPLE: you tell your customers your long term design goals so that they can plan ahead with requisite hardware and training issues. Also, so that they can know when you will have various features available that they can begin to use to advance their own strategic goals.

This approach is a bit different from the pre-announcements from many companies which are simply sales pitches. Our goal is not necessarily to sell stuff (although that's good too) but to give you advance notice as to what will be happening which may or may not require time and/or money from you. This is a bit like a college class where the lecturer gave you a 100 page assignment on the first day of class which was not due til the end of the term.

SO WHAT'S THE PLAN?
Now that we have that out of the way, here are some specifics to prepare for in SAFE 6.0, which will debut in late January of 2003. There will be more, but here are some best practices you can work on now.

1. No More First Name, Last Name Stuff
In SAFE 6.0 every person you deal with: Employees, Customers, Vendors, Sites, Prospects, etc. will be a Contact. The only place you will see a First Name or Last Name field will be in the Contacts Browse. Whenever you add a Customer or Vendor you will really be adding a Contact. This ends the constant 'why did this name print on that form?'

Action Item: Start making certain that every Customer and Vendor are linked to valid Billing and Sales Contacts. Also, make certain that every Site is linked to a valid Contact.

Action Item: Check with us to see if your forms all pull name information from linked Contacts. If not, have them revised as soon as you have finished your file maintenance above. You will be billed a $90.00 fee for each form we revise.

2. No More SASE
Simple Accounting Security Extensions will no longer exist as a separate product. SAFE 6.0 will have all of SASE's functionality folded into a single setup/configuration screen. This means far less hunting around for feature selection and it will enable us to expose many, many more of the 'under the hood' switches to our customers so that you can configure SAFE with far less help from us.

Action Item: If you don't have SASE, purchase it now for $595.00. Otherwise, you will not be eligible to upgrade to SAFE 6.0.

3. No More Windows 95
We will no longer support Windows 95. Period. And we will strongly encourage you to lose Windows 98 as well.

Action Item: Upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP Professional.

4. No more Windows 98 File Sharing
We will no longer support SAFE running on a Windows 98 machine acting as a 'file server'. Why? Besides the fact that Windows 2000 has been around for four years being nice about it hasn't encouraged too many of you to switch. Neither have the constant crashes, so evidently there are many of you with a real taste for pain.

Also: Now that there are a bunch of low cost, easy to install SQL databases, we want to move everyone onto some SQL database. Those of you who run SAFE over SQL know that it runs many, many times faster and is many, many times more stable than SAFE over TPS files. Unfortunately, Windows 98 file sharing does not support SQL databases so we are forced to market a completely separate database system (can you say $$$) which a lot of you simply cannot cost justify. Getting everyone on 'real' servers means that we can provide the benefits of SQL, at low cost, to all of you.

So for all these reasons and many more, Windows 98 Server Support will come to an end.

Action Item: Upgrade to Windows 2000 Server or Small Business Server.

Some of you are reading this and reacting, 'man, you guys are harsh!' Well, no. But we are trying very hard to improve SAFE and, unfortunately, we are starting to run into some real roadblocks with older technology and having to maintain backward compatibility. We try to introduce changes gradually, hence the six months of warning, but make no mistake, without the above (and more to come), there is no way we can achieve the kinds of things you have told us you want:

Hopefully, this gives you ample time to plan, then implement the changes we will be asking of you. In return, we trust that you will find SAFE to continue to grow as the single best operations solution available.