5.5 to 5.6 upgrade.

[badmotorvision]

Question, Our supplier is wanting to charge us a large sum to upgrade our 5.5a 7 user system to 5.6. Is this something we can handle ourselves? Or is it realy necessary to pay them 5 or 6 grand to perform the upgrade?

 

[ettienne]

It depends how tech savvy you are and how well you follow the upgrade instructions and pay attention to details.
My advice is to get the professionals to do it, but 5K sounds a bit steep. I did an upgrade on Monday for a client with 10 companies, it took me from 9:00am to 4:00pm so that will be about 1K billed. This included switching servers and going from Pervasive to MS SQL and modifying custom reports etc, so if you have a straight conversion then it would take less time.

 

[ettienne]

Is that for services only, or does it include software as well? That will make a big difference.

 

[badmotorvision]

Our support agreement includes software upgrades so were paying for labor. Basically they quoted 5 days start to finish. Same server MS-SQL 5 workstations.

 

[ettienne]

5 days... good grief. If you only have 5 workstations and one small company database then that is a morning's job.
How many company databases, which Accpac modules and how large is the database? A larger database will take longer to convert, but 5.5 to 5.6 is a fairly quick conversion.
Do you have CRM as well?

 

[badmotorvision]

No CRM just inventory, gl etc
5 companies largest company 2 gig the rest pretty small.

 

[ettienne]

That should be 1 day's work at most. I don't know who you spoke to and I do not want to step on anyone's toes, plus I may not have all the relevant information - so my reply is based on what you have told me.

 

[DjangMan]

The biggest challenge is what if something goes wrong. If it does then the SP may cover some of the additional costs (if it was their fault). If you end up breaking something you could end up paying much more.

I've had clients that do their own upgrades. Sometimes you get a panicked phone call because they forgot about a customization that they can't upgrade.

Ettienne - 1K for a day? You need to charge more. ;-)

 

[ettienne]

We're cheap in the South...

 

[Bluejay07]

What my company does it to obtain the Accpac data ahead of time (if possible) and do a test conversion on our systems. That way we know if we should expect any issues when converting the live data.

It also gives us a chance to view the modules and suggest changes or upgrades if needed (usually this is only done if we are the business partner).

As with Ettienne, a lot of support is performed remotely and the size of the database makes a huge difference on time frame.

I don't find that an estimate of 5 days is unreasonable, although in my observations usually three days at the most. The extra time frame allows for adjustments in case of problems or larger database. Keep in mind that during conversion, no-one has access to Accpac.

When we perform conversions, we start as soon as we can on Friday and hope that everything can be completed by Sunday night so that the client is ready to go come Monday morning.

If at first you don't succeed, then sky diving wasn't meant for you!