MAS resellers are grappling with a change in Sage support policies that has produced at least a mini furor. Sage has decided not to provide unlimited support calls to MAS resellers and instead will give them 10 free incidents a year each. For Accpac and Pro VARs, the change was a big yawn, since they have been used to the same terms for several years. Tom Miller, the Sage VP of channel management, said, "it's an education issue." If nothing else, there's a sense that Sage didn't handle the issue well with some irritation that it was announced just before the Summit conference, just underway at the Gaylord Hotel at National Harbor in Maryland, just downstream from Washington D.C. Read more...

The June quarter was a strong one, which is reportedly good for Microsoft which ended its fiscal year on June 30.  And conversations with some VARs that usually perform well found them glowing about the business during the last few months. "We are having a record year in terms of revenue and profits," said Sheldon Kralstein, CEO of Holmdel, N.J.-based Clients First Business Solutions. Kralstein said for the first six months of 2011 his company's revenue was up 20 percent and profitability up by 50 percent over the same period in 2010. Clients First has a broad product line: MAS 90/200/500, Dynamics AX/NAV, Epicor 9 and SAP Business One. Read more...

Dynamics reseller ePartners has launched a portal, www.erpcloudpower.com, that generates a customized pricing quote for prospects and provisions a free, 30-day trial of Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP or SL in the cloud. The portal, the company says, is designed for a streamlined approach for evaluating purchases of Dynamics and other cloud-based Microsoft technologies. Many of us may still be thinking, "Which Dynamics products are those other than Dynamics CRM Online?" since the Dynamics ERP cloud still is hosted  applications.  And the whole import of Steve Ballmer's cloud speech at Convergence – and I guess clouds are mainly vapor – was that a true SaaS product won't be on the market until next year with the next version of Dynamics NAV.

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Blogs get picked on here regardless of vendor affiliation. But it's not all blogs.  It's those that don't deliver on what should be a good idea. Today’s victim is the "Executive Insights" blog on the Dynamics community page. I would really love to see opinions and commentary from executives at Microsoft Business Solutions, except that we rarely get it and it’s been a while. Instead, the blog has bogged down in run-of-the-mill marketing posts and there are few of those. The last one was March 3 and the one before then is December 6. Executives are busy so if they can't work this into their schedule, fine, but then turn the space over to something else and change the title. Read more...