Multi-user reviews?

[Greenmind]

Can anyone with experience of Business Plus and multi-user, give me a kind of short review? Me and the girl in our office are constantly fighting over the computer that runs the shop. I am responsible for the orders themselves, while she does the paperwork and general admin, so we're always waiting for one another to get out of the way. I was thinking of upgrading to Business plus but as it's rather expensive I wanted to know how well it works and whether it's worth the investment. I don't think we can carry on as we are.

I have searched, looking to get an idea of the experience others have had but I can't find a great deal. One person described it as 'wading through treacle' which puts me off somewhat.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[chris ashdown]

Never heard it described as that before and dont understand the reasoning unless describing very high users like me with 7 users on a single site most of the time, but with maybe more normal 2-4 people it works really well

you get as many sites as you like

You can have multi-users on at the same time

Most of the time you can all work together but can be locked out say on a particular order if someone else is using it which stops two people editing at the same time a record so good safety there

with access database it gets slowed down with multi-users and is only suggested for a maximum of about 4-5 users, after that it slows down but is still userable

Unfortunatly actinic enterprise costs many thousands we were qoted between £6-8000, which seems a lot for just a faster system and seems to have the high price by using the MS SQL database rather than a non MS SQL database

:)

[Greenmind]

Thanks Chris. It will only be the two of us using it, perhaps three max. It's encouraging to hear that someone finds it works well. Still seems expensive though; I know Actinic are not totally averse to some mild haggling. Will they entertain me this time..

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

I have searched, looking to get an idea of the experience others have had but I can't find a great deal. One person described it as 'wading through treacle' which puts me off somewhat.

You might be referring to the comment in post #6 of this thread which 3 1/2 years ago and I believe it has been improved since then, although am not a user of MU/Buisness Plus so cannot comment myself and haven't followed the multi user comments.

http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=30161

[Greenmind]

so cannot comment myself and haven't followed the multi user comments.



Well, that's the thing: there aren't many comments. So then I'm thinking, perhaps it's not very popular.

[Duncan Rounding]

Maybe ask Actinic for some references.

[chris ashdown]

Could just be that theowners are bigger companies and dont visit the forum as much if at all, when you are small you have a bit of time to go on forums but as you get bigger time is possibly better spent on more management type operations

many of the regulars on here are designers who would have no use for business plus

[Greenmind]

Could just be that theowners are bigger companies and dont visit the forum as much if at all, when you are small you have a bit of time to go on forums but as you get bigger time is possibly better spent on more management type operations

many of the regulars on here are designers who would have no use for business plus

Valid points.

Yes, I'm sure it would be fine; was just looking for someone to say how much better it was since they employed it etc. Now, just whether to take the plunge..

I get very frustrated when I have to check on orders that must go out today, and someone is sitting there at the computer sorting invoices, but on the phone at the same time, so you can't even ask to butt in for a minute.

[chris ashdown]

If you only use either your time or her time at 50% efficiency, then I imagine it's really a no brainer.

For telephone sales calls coming in you need to have control straight away otherwise so easy to piss off the customer, and as you grow you just need to pay for extra licence for each new employee

If you can afford it, go for it and make your life so much easier

[Donna Kempster]

We also user MU in our office with 3 licences and 4 sites and works very well for us. V10 with the choice to select a site on start up has made a difference for us and when your taking telephone orders MU is vital IMO. It sounds like you won't be able to expand your business if you stay the way you are. Its not like the investment needs to be made every year.

The sync server was a bit clunky in v9 but not had issues in v10 and its quicker to swap sites etc.

[Greenmind]

Thanks for your input. I am sold.

Had an Actinic guy phone up today - he's not willing to move on price. I'll have to tell him about the headache-inducing bug we've been putting up with for the last three years i.e. V8 crashes whenever you add an item to an existing order. Surely a goodwill gesture is due.

[Pet Dispensary]

Hi the reason we changed to Actinic was for the multi-user option, we have it networked over 3 machines and it is working really well. It isn't slow and we process a lot of orders each day. We have had it running for 4 weeks now and no problems so far with it. Lynsey www.petdispensary.co.uk

[BPJ553]

We are on v9 and use a combination of mole end one stop processing and standard actinic licences. We have 4 users using the actinic licences and another 3 uses using the mole end plug in. Total 7 users accessing at the same time.

All in all it is 'ok'. The mole end software runs very smoothly but we have several crashes a day on the main actinic site. It's managable buy I think v10 is supposed to be more stable.

It is worth trialling for 30 days the mole end plug in if all you want to do is process and view orders. But you can't modify existing orders. So we have a mixture.

Despatch uses mole end, while sales and design uses original actinic.

All in all I am satisfied but we will be upgrading to v11 as I feel v9 is struggling.

[Clive.Aspen]

So the mole end one stop processing plug in allows multiple users to work on one site? I f I wanted an extra user to just process orders whats the difference between actinic multi-user license and the mole end plug in?

[Greenmind]

We finally bought Business plus V10 with added user and installed it today. After much messing around we kind of got it working, but unfortunately we only seem to be able to open orders on the machine on which Actinic was fired up first i.e no order will open on the other machine - it just hangs, close down Actinic on the first machine and the order pops open on the other. Start Actinic back up on the first and orders won't open, until you close down Actinic on the other. Terribly frustrating and utterly useless as it stands. Just hope it's a simple fix.

[chris ashdown]

Souns like a instalation problem, what version were you upgrading from, did you install v10 then import old snapshot

Have you got second machine getting its site from the first machine

One of the advantages of MU is that it locks out other users of a order when one person has the order open , this is a security measure to stop both writting to the order at the same time

[Greenmind]

Hi Chris. We're upgrading from 8.5.1.

We had V10 installed on the new computer as a trial. I put in the license key, then took a snapshot from current working computer and loaded that into the new one and set it to share. Then installed V10 on the current machine and located the sites file on the new machine as per instructions.

The working computer seemed to struggle with this new arrangement in that V10 didn't want to fire up, but eventually it did after we made a change to the sites.ini file on the new computer, but then the problem as mentioned previously i.e. we can't view orders on current machine unless we close down V10 on new machine. And if we fire it up again on new machine, we can't view orders on that unless we close it down on current machine.

Note, I'm not talking about viewing the same order, we can't view any other order.

I shall call Actinic on Monday.

[Sean Williams]

We have no issues with Business Plus multi-user.
My advice would be to make sure you snapshot the site, completely uninstall all versions of Actinic from all computers (we even run through the Registry to be sure every trace is gone) shut down computers and switch on again and then do clean installs of V10 on each machine, one at a time.
Run the Actinics using the demo Site1 to make sure all is working as it should, then import your snapshots.
If Actinic then fails to work correctly, you probably have a corrupt database and may need to whizz it over to Actinic for repair.
Terribly long-winded, but it's always worked for us; in fact we've never had a corrupted database - it's always been a dodgy installation.

[Greenmind]

Thanks Sean. I appreciate your input. I shall try your suggestions.

Only trouble is having to do all this at the end of the day, and not getting home till very late. :(

I want my normal (pre-ecommerce) life back.

[chris ashdown]

Only trouble is having to do all this at the end of the day, and not getting home till very late. :(

I want my normal (pre-ecommerce) life back.

Your not alone with that thought, but they say it's worth it in the end (so they say)

[Jan]

So the mole end one stop processing plug in allows multiple users to work on one site? I f I wanted an extra user to just process orders whats the difference between actinic multi-user license and the mole end plug in?Our plugin works against the Actinic data and runs as a separate program. When you run it up you see the list of orders just as you would on the Actinic order screen. You can run it on two machines, you don't have to have Actinic running on either of those machines. It allows you to process orders in batches, has very good searching and filtering operations and so is really good for dealing with telephone queries. Another popular feature is the courier links, you can click on a button in OSOP and your orders are transferred to your courier system and labels are printed. It doesn't include all of the order processing features that Actinic gives you, for example you can't back order items and you can't part ship orders. There is a free trial here :

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/Multiuser-One-Stop-Order-Processing-For-Actinic.html

so you can try it out, you'll see quite quickly whether it would improve your order processing or not. If you click on the review tab you will see our feefo reviews for the product - people that use it really like it.

[Greenmind]

Just for the record: I managed to fix this issue by switching the machines i.e. what was going to be the main is now the extra user. Works ok for me that way round - no idea why however.