Thanks for the info.
I agree with you on the trial conversion. The thing we have encountered are it has scared off (gladly on our part) customer who were eager to convert to the lastest and greatest. (But this use to a source of $ as Macola use to supply service packs @ 1 a quarter up until 7.6.100a).
Now when we sugguest a trial conversion then think there is something wrong with the utility or the program, and they also are expressing that this is not an upgrade but a whole new program.
We have been aggressive on ES and Esynergy, even with all of the issues. Having said that, it does appear that there may be alot of sites that may never make the leap from Progression to ES.
On the PACES program, we have not taken advantage of it. Once I have free time, I would not mind looking to see if they are running webinars for partners. We have viewed it as not practical for us; because, the conversions we have run, we would not have been able to forward the data to macola, and have them send it back. At one point we thought that was part of the program. We have run the conversion utility a few times now, and the support was good/great. One customer had bad data in the G/L comparative file, never cared (didn't run comparatives), and we go stung when the comparative data was added into the conversion. The trials worked, we updated, and then did a final, and it didn't. There was no way to fix the data in the system using the system, so we edited it in SQL.
We promised the customer Friday PM pickup of data, Monday AM starting on ES, Monday PM near normal operations. We hit the target, but it was bloody.
Somewhere in that long mess is my single biggest issue with the ES system. I like the ability to fix an issue caused by the system with-in the system. (ex. Client uses a non-numeric char in the cash flow payment type/meth/no field 3. This gets recorded but causes various report and views to crash. one example of many) I have had to train our Business Advisors (Macola Tech/Trainers) on how to use query analyzer and enterprise manager. Only good thing is I am pleased with how they picked it up. Not sure what we will do when we get the first out of balance posting, or maybe that will never happen.
Hope I did not overwelm you.