SAP Business One 8.8 - Orchestra Takes Part in SAP's Official Review

SAP Business One 8.8 Official Review

Last week Orchestra was one of the US partners selected to officially review the SAP Business One 8.8 product. Orchestra was selected to take part in this preview because of our experience performing SAP implementations, diverse customer basis, and interest in the new product. Several other partners in our group were also selected to review this product and make recommendations for the upcoming release.

Here is a brief synopsis of the results:

SAP Business One 8.8 - Primary Findings:

The new UI was a significant upgrade over the previous versions of the system. The presence of data archiving and crystal reports were also touted as excellent enhancements to the core product. Overall impressions were that the product was functioning well and should be able to enter ramp-up shortly. Most partners recommended that the product be moved into ramp-up.

We also presented to SAP some needed additions to the product that we hope to see in the upcoming release. Most users also won't notice much change beyond that which has already been mentioned in this article. That is to say, many of the changes are in the back-end (i.e. a more unified code base), are cosmetic, or involve performance gains in the application. That's not to say that this release is lipstick on a pig. Quite the contrary, there are significant improvements, but users will have to look deeper to find them than they did when the jump from SAP Business One 2005 to SAP Business One 2007 was made.

Orchestra was also able to make some recommendations on how to better handle units of measure, tax codes, reports, and other product features in this version that required some tweaking. We received a great response from SAP and the development staff, and we hope to see some of these suggestions in the final release.

SAP Business One 8.8 - Stability and Performance:

The product is ready to go from a stability standpoint. Significant testing was done on the core document and accounting functionality of SAP, and it's as robust as ever. The application also seems to be quite solid even though we were routed through several remote hosts while accessing it. In the 20 hours of testing committed to the product, nobody reported a single application crash.

Performance was more difficult to test, as we had no large data sets or the ability to put it under a high user load. It is difficult to get proper performance metrics without the ability to upgrade an existing 2007 client database and the associated content.  Orchestra is planning on writing a performance review as soon as this is possible. One noticeable difference is that the new UI does put a more significant strain on computing resources than the old UI. While the difference is subtle on most set-ups, older computers may want to consider disabling the new bells and whistles to keep things moving quickly.  It's nice that SAP has included this option for older computers.

SAP Business One 8.8 - Usability and Functionality:

Functionally, the product is very similar to the 2007 version. The major difference being the addition of a new reporting engine. Also, the new UI design adds some nice visual effects that are designed to draw your eye toward important parts of the screen - thereby improving the application usability. The addition of a new reporting engine is awesome, but the new reports have not been released yet. I'm hoping to see a fairly significant update to the print layouts and general reports via crystal as we get closer to the release date. Finally, the archiving tool will take some pressure off of customers that have been using the system for a few years with high transactional volume.

For details on the SAP Business One 8.8 New Skin and UI, click here.

SAP Business One 8.8 - Overall Impressions:

Orchestra recommended that the product be released for both evaluation purposes and production ramp-up. While we did run into the occasional hiccup, and there are some enhancements that would be nice to have before release, the product is effectively ready. We're going to be putting several of our own customers into the ramp-up program in the coming weeks, and I look forward to being able to report our first successful migration.