Softworld: Major overhaul to Sage Line-100
Accounting software giant, Sage, has launched a major upgrade to the Line-100 commercial modules, claiming it is the first accounting software package to be based entirely on .Net.
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The product was launched on the first day of the 2003 Spring Softworld Accounting & Finance show, with David Karlin, the groups chief technology officer, insisting that ‘yes the software is new’.
He said years of work had gone into re-writing the whole underlying framework, describing what was there as ‘a tangled mess of spaghetti’.
‘It is very rare for 15 years of product development to be distilled in this way, but this is what we’ve done,’ said Karlin. He said that the company had concentrated on usability, ensuring that the Line-100 range has a very similar user interface to Line-50, making any upgrade process as simple as possible. He said new migration tools would allow Line-50 users to upgrade to Line-100 in a weekend.
‘We are not going to claim that it is the sexiest or most high-tech product on the market,’ he said, before going on to explain that usability and familiarity were more important.
As ever the 10,000 members of the Sage accountants club were cited as being extremely important to the development and growth of the company. In January the managing director of the Sage SME division vowed to improve customer satisfaction levels among its accountant clients to 90% within three months.
Graham Wylie, founder and UK managing director said: ‘We have waited several years for the Line-100 launch. It has been an interesting year, with new entrants to the market – some of whom you will know.’ He went on to say that yesterday marked the start of a campaign to prove to the market the value of the software.
