Sage Drive is a Sage 50c feature that allows you to share your Sage 50 company data with users outside your office. When the feature was first introduced, sharing your data meant that only one user could access that company, no matter how many user licenses you had. Later they improved things a little by giving all other users read-only access while the company is shared. Both times I freely expressed my opinion that to be useful, this feature had to allow full access to users in the office even while the data is shared on Sage Drive. Recently Sage announced that this has finally happened.
If you’re interested in this feature, I recommend reading Sage’s blog post Sage Drive Multi-User now available for Sage 50cloud – U.S. Edition!. Be sure to watch the video at the bottom of the post too. Here are some key points:
- Multi-user functionality is an additional subscription that can be purchased by contacting the Sage 50 sales team.
- All users will need a fast internet connection, including the upload speeds. In different places Sage recommends either 20 or 25 mbps download speeds and 10mbps upload speeds for best performance, and a required minimum of 10 mbps download and 5 mbps upload speeds (or 3 depending on which article you read) for small companies.
- You will need to be on at least version 2019.0 and all users must be on the same version.
I have not had an opportunity to test this new functionality but I’m glad to see Sage has come through with this feature that they have been promising. I haven’t seen pricing for the additional subscription yet. But the fact that there is an additional subscription combined with the warning in the video that performance will be slower while the company is shared leads me to think that anyone who wants to share their Sage 50 data with more than a few users would be better off setting up a Terminal Server. Or if you don’t want to maintain your own Terminal Server, you can check into hosting services for Sage 50. Sorry but I don’t have any recommendations for hosting companies. Of course both of those options have significant costs of their own, but I would expect either of them to provide better speed and reliability.
