Summit Hosting was proud to continue its sponsorship and present at the 2021 Chortek and CLA Sage 100 User Group Meeting on Tuesday, October 12, 2021. This fourth annual event included 21 presentations from Sage and third-party vendors to educate and advise on best practices and get the most from their investment in Sage 100 software.
The event kicked off with a presentation from Matt Gentry of Sage Software advising of the new features and functions in Sage 100 and upcoming enhancements in the road ahead. He noted that the most significant new functionality to date came in the 2020 release with track and trace functionality for lot and serialized inventory. When you are using software like Sage 100, which has been around for over 30 years, new significant functions are hard to find. Still, enhancements for compliance, ease of use, security, and mitigation of the potential for error were plentiful, with a big focus on security and the cloud. For example:
- Compliance: 1099NEC form type available throughout the purchasing suite
- Ease of Use: Enhanced lookup for purchase order history you can drill down to all receipts for that purchase order and all invoice history for that purchase order.
- Error Prevention: new company types can segregate whether a particular company code is a live production or test company. With this new feature, you can block the ability to overwrite a live company by mistake in the copy company function.
In total, there were 134 enhancements attributed to the 2021 release, with a large number associated with technology enhancements, security, and supporting the move to the cloud. For example, Sage had to update its Visual Process Flows due to the retirement of Adobe Flash and upgrade the function to HTML5.
If you are using Sage 2017 or earlier, you will need to upgrade for the new technology to work. Patches are available for 2019-2020, and now in 2021, the new feature is fully functional.
Security was a big focus, with support for additional email authentication methods and a slew of new functions around roles in Sage 100. Security was also the focus of the Summit Hosting presentation. Cyber security is a crucial concern in today's connected world, whether on-premise or in the cloud.
Cyberattack prevention requires vigilance from the entire organization as well as the IT department or cloud service provider. Prevention strategies are top to bottom, starting with executive leadership down to awareness training for employees. Some guidelines for prevention include:
Be careful what you click.
- Links or attachments in emails you weren’t expecting to receive are often malicious.
Perform regular scans.
- Malware can travel from your computer over a network to others’ computers or your server.
Use strong passwords.
- Use different passwords for every account when possible and the longer you make them the better.
- Password vault applications are your best friend!
Advanced Tools.
- Artificial intelligence agents deployed inside the network can find patterns used by hackers to stop activity before it causes damage.
- Training and testing tools for your staff include awareness and fake attacks to see how users react.
- Periodic external intrusion testing can point out weaknesses in your perimeter defenses.
The future of business is in an always on, always secure, available from anywhere cloud. Contact us today to learn more about how Summit Hosting can secure your Sage 100 system with dedicated cloud servers and keep your business ready for the future.