John,

First of all, thanks for the response.

When I'm talking about reliability I mean program crashes, problems with record locking, and overall application stability. We currently are running Pro Series 6.5 on FoxPro with 25 users and are having increasing problems with performance and reliability issues. Purchase orders seems to be particularly crash prone when there is more than about a half dozen concurrent users and anything is going on with inventory control.

I've heard that AccPac's Pro Series SQL version is possibly even more unstable than the VFP version. Not necessarily in terms of data corruption because SQL is of course a better platform but in terms of program lockups and crashes. I've also got a chance to look at the AccPac Pro Series SQL code and I'm not at all impressed. It appears they basically built wrapper function to replace VFP commands in every line of source code and then did a massive find/replace across the entire source base. I have done a complete install and it appears to run 'ok' but under the hood Pro Series SQL looks like a real mess. So I wasn't suprised at all to hear Pro Series SQL may possibly have reliability issues.

By far the most important factor for us at this point is reliability. We cannot stay on AccPac Pro Series 6.5 (VFP databases) because it is too crash prone and performance is seriously degraded now with 25 users. Moving to AccPac SQL is of course an obvious next step but AccountMate appears to be an alternative solution that may be more stable on the SQL platform.

As far as functionality goes I've heard that AM and Pro Series are quite similar. Can you think of anything major features that are missing from AccountMate that AccPac Pro Series has?

Greg

>reliability ??? I'm guessing your talking about the data. You did not state which versions you are comparing - but the latest I think are the about the same as far as reliability. In the Pro world you get all the source - but some of the code is old (meaning not using the latest foxpro features). AM does provide source but not all and many of the important data routines are not provided (mostly hidden in other classes). But like all VFP programs it is really impossible to hide code from a hacker. But they don't provide the all code. On the other hand AM uses the latest VFP tricks which makes programming a little easier. I also like AM over Pro because the AM code is much easier to read..
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>Better question - which provides a better fit to the client needs. Only the client and you can answer that...
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>John