UDS Customer Newsletter

December 20, 2004

W-2 Form Changes

By this time you should have received an email for the 2004 W-2 program changes. The forms have changed slightly so you will need to update your system before printing the W-2's for this year. There is a left margin added to the program to accommodate the alignment change.

We have also added more print formats. Make sure you pick the type that matches the forms you have or get forms that match one of the allowed formats. The 4-Up Condensed or 4-Up Universal versions look interesting.

SQL Upgrade Special

At the November user conference the upgrade path from ActiveApplications Standard to ActiveApplications SQL was announced. Final pricing is posted on the www.aasql.com <http://www.aasql.com> web site. If you are currently on support for the Access version deduct 30% off the calculated price. The price you pay will not get any better in the near future.

Those attending the user conference received an additional bonus.

If your company is using AA standard (Access Database), it is time to seriously consider converting to AASQL. Conversion Programs are written to make the conversion from the Access version to the SQL version easy and painless.

Operationally you will not see much difference between the two versions. AASQL is significantly more reliable and has many enhancements. Most of the significant enhancements are defined on this page <http://www.aasql.com/added_features.htm>

Eventually Microsoft will not offer Access as a database format. This could happen next year. At that time you must switch to AASQL or risk the possibility of having your business ties to an outdated and unsupported database format. You also will miss out on all future enhancements to the software.

Unless you have several users it is not critical that you switch at this time but you should at least be planning to do so in the next few years. If you have several users (more than 10) you should move soon. The number of users is an indication of the activity on your system. System activity is a big factor in making Access unstable but it is hard to measure directly. AA Standard does such a good job of using Access efficiently that you do not see many of the possible failures but failure could occur at any time. You would then have to restore from your backup. When that happens you will understand what reliability means to you in terms of duplicated effort work and lost data.

Please seriously consider upgrading your system.

Call UDS and your hardware support people for more information on how to purchase SQL and what the server requirements would be.

Future Products? New SQL option may be available soon?

Microsoft just announced the beta release of SQL Express 2005. As I have said for years Microsoft, before they can do away with Access, must come up with a better version of SQL. It must be made easier to administer for the small business. They have been working on such a product for a long time. They just announced the beta release of SQL Express. The expected release date is July for 2005 (this will change).

This may be your alternative to the full version of SQL for smaller networks. This could help reduce total cost of the upgrade and make it easier to administer.

We have downloaded the beta release but have not used it yet so it is too soon to have a comparative evaluation to normal SQL. We do not know if it even works yet but over the next several months we will keep you posted on our assessment. By no means is it a guaranteed alternative and it will not save money on ActiveApplications and we do not know how well it works but it has some possibility.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

I hope your year was as good as our and you are looking forward to an improved 2005. The staff at UDS.