Although it had been announced before the conference, version 5.5 of the Sage ACCPAC ERP product is beginning to ship as of the end of April. We've released the first installment which includes the core product, but there appear to be several parts that aren't yet out.
The real news in this release is that Sage is giving users that are current on support agreements access to a number of products they would have had to pay for in the past. For example, serial and lot numbering has always been extra. Now it's included in the Inventory product. The "number change" utilities that allow users to change G/L account numbers, customer numbers, etc. have been bundled.
Most interesting, ACCPAC is including Alerts (not on the disks we've received to date) Lite and CRM in the core products. If you have System Manager, you'll get one user of the server, and 5 pre-built (non changeable) alerts.
Not a bad deal, but to my eye, an alternative to putting significant development dollars into the core product.
Customers with add-ons or third party products will have to wait a few weeks (maybe months) for compatibility with 5.5. Stay tuned for more.
