Sage Developer Programme

[edmondscommerce]

Anyone here a member

what are your thoughts - is it worth the price tag?

 

[johndon68]

I am a member and used to be the Manager of Developer Services at Sage as well.

As to whether it is worth it or not, you need to be aware of the following (assuming you are not already):

1. Whilst Sage do supply examples with the developer tools, there is a rather large assumption made that you are familiar with the Sage products you are developing for.

2. The cost is ongoing, so, if after a year, you do not renew your membership, you lose all rights to use the developer tools.

3. The tools are also version specific so, for example, if you develop an application to work with v2013 of Sage 50 (the current version), next year it will not work with v2014 without some, albeit small, amendments to the code. Likewise, an application developed for v2013 will not work with v2012.

4. There is an awful lot of competition, there are very few facilities/features that are not already covered by existing developers.

5. Given the initial and ongoing costs and development requirements, it can be cheaper to get an existing developer to create applications for you.

6. Depending on the versions of Sage you are looking to develop for, the tools that work with Instant and Sage 50 for example, do not work with Sage 200, the Sage 200 tools are completely different.

It is worth it for me as, without it, I'd not be able to offer the services that I do.

John

 

[edmondscommerce]

Thanks John some good points

I do notice that there are a few Sage addons that effectively create a RESTful webservice from Sage which is then much more easy to work with from a web development point of view.

What are your thoughts on this kind of approach?

 

[garyk]

Ha, my views on it got recently covered by channelweb, you can read the article here http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/2198705/sage-on-the-hunt-for-more-developer-partners

If you need to register to view the content a PDF is here http://coolretro.livedrive.com/item/a0f9b07729dd4b5980a752239d8fc289

Bascially as an annual fee its a rip-off, nice for me to get something into print about my old foes Sage.

Gary

 

[johndon68]

As Gary points out, the cost of membership is substantial albeit Sage are, at least, completely up front about this.

I have to be honest, other than using them for integrating desktop based applications with some ecommerce platforms I'm not that familiar with web services but, if they expose the data in such a way that makes it accessible to your application then that may be a better way to go. With regards to such add ons, there is a very fine line to be careful of:

Sage's licence agreement does not allow a 3rd party to 'wrap' their API in to another DLL that then allows a non Sage developer to use the API. So, an application exposed a method that took a DataTable and created an invoice from that table in Sage would be OK but an application that had an Invoice object that allowed you to populate properties and then update Sage would probably fall foul of the licence.

Can I ask what you would be looking to do with Sage?

John

 

[garyk]

The other thing to note Joseph if if you want to get data *out* of Sage then you can do this using the read-only ODBC driver which gets installed with Sage 50 and that means you don't need to use the developer kit at all and can pretty much do what you want.

Sage 200 and above (Sage 1000) use MSSQL as the backend, Ive done alot of work with Sage 1000 and just work with the DB directly, again no SDK required.

Gary

 

[edmondscommerce]

Thanks for the feedback everyone

It sounds like I will give it a pass