Announcement: Changes to Distribution of Sdata Adapter for Sage 50 Accounts (UK)

[darroncockram]

This is a note to let you know about a change to how the Sdata adapter for Sage 50 Accounts UK (hereafter referred to as 'Accounts' for brevity) will be distributed going forwards.

As of the v28 release, which will be shipping very soon, the Sdata adapter will no longer be included as part of the default installation of Accounts. Instead, the Sdata adpater is being made as a separate download on GitHub - available here: https://github.com/Sage/sdata-downloads/blob/master/Sage50AccountsSDataInstaller.msi?raw=true, and any future updates will be released via that GitHub repository.

If a machine already has Accounts v27 installed and v28 is deployed side-by-side to the same machine then no special action is required and the existing Sdata will detect v28 has been installed and will surface and v28 data as normal. If v28 is deployed as an upgrade to v27 or earlier, or installed to a 'clean' machine then the Sdata adapter and feeds will NOT be available by default, and the above linked installation must be run on the same machine to enable Sdata support. Once installed the Sdata adapter/feeds will work for v28 as normal. The same will be true for v29, v30, etc.

NOTE: To allay some some concerns you might have about this change - this is not a death knell for Sdata support for Accounts. Quite the opposite in fact. The driver behind this change is to allow us to separate the Sdata adapter release cycle from the Accounts one. This allows us to release Sdata updates without tying them to the release schedule of Accounts meaning you should get them much sooner. Some of you will recall the problems we saw with the v27.0 of release of Accounts where we shipped with a breaking bug that stopped the Sdata adapter working. There was then a delay of several months before we could ship the fix for this issue, despite it being a relatively quick/easy bug to resolve, as it could only be included as part of the main Accounts release so had to wait for the v.27.1 update. This change to the distribution model directly addresses this limitation and means changes/fixes for the Sdata adpater can be shipped immediately rather than wait weeks or months for the next release of Accounts. Timing-wise this change in distribution had to be done as part of a major version release as it would have been a breaking change in a minor version release.

Thanks

7th December 2022 - Version updated to include support for Sag e50 Accounts v29.0