Glad someone got it...
From: CBB - Jay Fuller
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 4:56 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
..snicker...
I hear sonar can keep you up at night! ;)
----- Original Message -----
From: ch...@wbmfg.com
To: af@afmug.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 5:49 PM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
I hear Sonar is easy...
From: CBB - Jay Fuller
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 4:48 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
...i really want to comment on this....but i won't lol
i like young flashy software tho!! but sometimes it isn't...matured.
yah, i tried to not comment lol
not saying that about sonar at all....or hot wives for that matter.
----- Original Message -----
From: James Howard
To: 'af@afmug.com'
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 4:48 PM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
So you’re saying that some people will take their time and choose one and
stick with it for life while others will play the field, pick the hottest
youngest available model and then get tired of it and move to something newer
and flashier every few years?
From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of ch...@wbmfg.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 4:42 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Same goes for picking a wife.
From: Matt Hoppes
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 3:38 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
A great reason to make sure you pick the right billing platform the first
time.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 17:28, <ch...@wbmfg.com> <ch...@wbmfg.com> wrote:
It never goes smoothly.
I used to work for banks, talk about a headache when you change out their
software that manages all the customer accounts etc. They migrated off an old
dinosaur main frame to an AS-400 with all the latest software. I think it took
more than 6 months to actually get it up and going.
I have worked for several telephone companies and all of them have
migrated software, most of them multiple times. Again, never smooth, always
pain.
Ditto for WISPS, been there, done that too. Platypus was probably the
easiest due to the IT department being very hands on through the process.
It never goes smoothly and they can guarantee everything to work all they
want, but it will not work perfectly without elbow grease.
From: Nathan Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 3:21 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Didn't this thread start out with somebody complaining that their new
vendor either wasn't willing to do this or weren't doing an effective or good
job of it? Vendor on-boarding is not always an option, or at least is not
something that is guaranteed to work or go smoothly.
-- Nathan
From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of ch...@wbmfg.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:15 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Been through this many times in my life. Done it both ways. Several
times.
Prefer the new vendor to do onboarding for me.
You get what you pay for.
From: Nathan Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 3:11 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Not true. It doesn't matter what the file format of the export is: you
still have to take the time to figure out how to shoehorn data from one schema
into another. As talked about earlier, maybe you'll get support from your new
vendor with that, maybe not. There will be mistakes made during that process,
and some of it will have to be re-done. You also have to hook the new product
into all of your authentication systems and then test that to make sure it
works and doesn't suddenly break people's connections.
Then there will be the mistakes that come from actually using the new
software that you are unfamiliar with, and/or cajoling it to do what you need
it to do and which you already knew how to do with the old software. People
will get billed wrong for a while and then you'll have to sort out that mess as
your customers bring the billing mistakes to your attention. Some people that
need to get billed won't be...others will get double-billed. Pro-rates will
get miscalculated. The system will on-hold somebody by mistake that shouldn't
have been. And on and on.
If the software is locally hosted, you can learn a new system and
transition over to it on your own schedule, instead of being pushed into the
deep end of the pool on day 1.
-- Nathan
From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of ch...@wbmfg.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:04 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Export backups as CSV and you can re-import it into any database. You
will only be screwed for a very short time.
From: Nathan Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:13 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
I have to say that I'm partially with Matt on this one.
It's really not about access to your own data, although that can
certainly be a component depending on how things are designed. It sounds like
perhaps Sonar has no problem giving you reasonable access to exports of your
data for you to backup yourself, and for the moment, I'm going to give them the
benefit of the doubt on this.
I don't think I have to convince anyone how critical billing software is
to an organization. If it screws up or stops working, you are losing money,
and fast.
The SaaS model has some clear benefits to both parties (developer and
user), but it has an equal number of new downsides as well. One
big-E-on-the-eyechart one is what happens if the product is discontinued,
either because the parent company/developers go out of business or for some
other reason.
In the traditional software licensing and hosting model, where you use
your own computing resources to execute the code, if the development company
goes out of business one day, the software that you still possess a copy of
does not suddenly become less useful to you. Sure, you won't get future
upgrades and fixes to the product from the vendor, but at least you have some
time to figure out what your options are and how you want to proceed, and you
can migrate to a new platform on YOUR OWN timetable, not someone else's. And
in the meantime, your business operations are not negatively impacted.
In the SaaS model, it doesn't matter if you have a complete, unabridged,
and up-to-date export of the data: when the product is discontinued without
warning, and the company shuts down the software servers, YOU ARE SO SCREWED.
That data export does you zero good if you don't have product to process and
interpret and act on it. In the case of billing software, this means you are
not collecting payments for service from your customers, which is a big
problem. Even if you could find a suitable replacement for the software the
next day, you still have to figure out how to massage the data export you do
have so that the new software can import it, work through the inevitable
imperfections of that import (certain fields from the export that don't map
cleanly to fields in the new product), learn a new piece of software from
scratch, and figure out how to get by or work around issues resulting from
"feature X" that you depended heavily on in the old software but which no
longer exists in any form in the new one. Things WILL be complete chaos for a
while; there's no way around this.
We are actively looking for a new billing platform, and in the meantime
we have been running a piece of software that we bought and implemented back
when it was in active development but which has now been discontinued for
years. The reason that this is even possible is because it is self-hosted.
Back when this product was being developed, it was very popular and sold very
well. Nothing is "too big to fail"...nothing. Heck, Google has shitcanned
their fair share of services over the years after deeming them inviable,
leaving devoted users of them high-and-dry.
That we have personally experienced having a billing software vendor go
belly-up gives us great pause when it comes to evaluating our options in the
hosted/cloud space. This is not to say that we would never consider
billing-in-the-cloud, but it would have to be awfully compelling, and I think
it would greatly help if there were certain guarantees in place. One example
would be if the developer held the source code of the software in escrow, to be
automatically released if a "dead man's switch" were tripped. I suspect this
is what Matt has in mind when he talks about "contracts" -- they are not just
about protecting the seller, but about protecting both parties.
-- Nathan
From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Matt Hoppes
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2017 11:37 AM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Local install.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:32, Josh Reynolds <j...@kyneticwifi.com> wrote:
Good luck with that. Any company could close up shop today, and if they
are bankrupt, they are bankrupt.
On Oct 17, 2017 12:27 PM, "Matt Hoppes"
<mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net> wrote:
It also means at any point they can just close up shop leaving my data
and my customer information high and dry with no recourse.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:24, Josh Reynolds <j...@kyneticwifi.com> wrote:
They provide enough value to avoid locking you in a contract that
would otherwise retain your business when they don't continuously earn it.
Others are NOT the same.
On Oct 17, 2017 12:22 PM, "Matt Hoppes"
<mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net> wrote:
No contract? That's frankly beyond scary.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 13:06, Adam Moffett <dmmoff...@gmail.com> wrote:
Sonar is strictly per user with no contract, so if you haven't
migrated any users in yet then you pay the minimum.....which I think is
$100/month.
------ Original Message ------
From: "Matt Hoppes" <mattli...@rivervalleyinternet.net>
To: af@afmug.com
Sent: 10/17/2017 9:16:46 AM
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Fail.
On Oct 17, 2017, at 08:54, Lewis Bergman
<lewis.berg...@gmail.com> wrote:
Many of them start charging you regardless if you are on
their system yet. Once you sign the contract, you start paying.
On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 6:00 PM Nathan Anderson
<nath...@fsr.com> wrote:
I can understand this if the product in question is
purchased/licensed for a one-time upfront fee. However, if you have a SaaS
model with recurring revenues, it seems like it would be in your best interest
to help the customer move existing data over to your product cost-free, and
thus get them to be a paying customer ASAP.
-- Nathan
------------------------------------------------------------
From: Af <af-boun...@afmug.com> on behalf of Lewis Bergman
<lewis.berg...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2017 3:36 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Sonar
Yea, this seems to be a common practice in the software
industry. What they all should really say is that they help you convert. I am
going through this with ECi at the moment. We paid several thousand for them to
convert our database. What it really was was a half hearted gesture at putting
the DB into an excel spreadsheet that they spent zero time checking for sanity.
They expect us to do all that.
It seems that most software companies expect their
customers to have a whole team of people doing what seems to be the software
companies job. Not saying Sonar fits the description, just that that seems to
be the rule not the exception.
On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 5:24 PM Sterling Jacobson
<sterl...@avative.net> wrote:
Taking forever to migrate from Platypus to Sonar.
I was told conversion was free, but they didn't tell me I
had to do all my own conversion from Plat to Sonar, so in my mind that's not
free.
I paid Spender Lambert to move some initial data to their
format, but I've been on a hold with Sonar since last month.
Super excited to get going with a 'modern' billing
system, but so far the process has been a total snoozer.
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