Integrating with Sage Financial Software [closed]

Question

I have recently been asked to develop an application that will have to integrate with Sage Line 50 financial software.
I've done some googling and I am surprised at the lack of info on interfacing with Sage from Java or .Net. Is Sage such a black box that you need to sign up to a Sage Developer program before you get any info?
Are there any open source options to allow apps to talk to Sage?

Any info appreciated.

Cheers

Paul

Answer 1

I've done quite a bit with Sage Line 50 V9 (a couple of versions old, I know). Sage provide an ODBC driver which you can happily talk to with ADO & ADO.NET. The driver is however read-only which may or may not be an issue to you. There do seem to be some limitations with SQL queries though - in particular, double joins don't work (a JOIN b JOIN c) & need to be flattened-out. Also, the DISTINCT keyword doesn't seem to be recognised. Hope this of some use.

Answer 2

Going back a few years, but Sage also used to provide a read-write API (not ODBC based) for accessing the data in their products.

I'm not surprised that you need to join the developer program - Sage is a traditional closed source commercial application - it's unlikly to have open source options available for it.

Joining the dev program used to be free for Sage customers, which the people you are working for should be, surely...?

EDIT - yikes, not free any more

Answer 3

Looking on the Sage UK site I found the following Developer SDK.

Upshot is that you need to use .Net if you want to use the SDK.

Problem is that the SDK is only available under the Developer programme which starts at £1500: Here's the brochure.

However the developer programme does give you free copies of the Sage software for development purposes, so I can see the benefits if your business is Sage integration.

Another option is an addon for Sage which is sold by Sage for £299

http://shop.sage.co.uk/pdf/connect_for_Sage_50.pdf

This gives an XML import/export facility, this may be enough for my purposes.

Answer 4

Theres a new methodology Sage are moving to called SData. I think you can read about this at http://sdata.sage.com/

The long term aspiration is that SData will provide full CRUD facilities and simplify integration between different Sage programs (of which there are many!) and therefore provide a consistent web service that 3rd party applications can be integrated with too.