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New clients are invariably looking to Software as a Service (SaaS) these days for a host of benefits. These include no hardware costs, continuous upgrades, built in support (no local IT team), built in PCI (payment card industry) compliance and hopefully overall lower costs. You only have to look at the success of Microsoft’s Office 365 to see the appeal. No more Exchange servers managed in house by a dedicated IT team.
What you need to know about iMIS Cloud
What do you do if you have a self-hosted CRM/ERP/EMS? What if you want to move your copy of iMIS CRM to the Cloud? Well here is what you most need to know to make an informed decision.
There are a few important things to bear in mind off the bat:
- There will be no iMIS Desktop.
- All non-standard iMIS objects will be removed.
- You must be on the latest version of iMIS and service pack to even consider moving to Cloud.
Even though that list might seem scary, it doesn’t have to be. If your company is a heavy desktop user, there will be a considerable training overhead to get everybody used to doing everything in the staff site but that may not be an insurmountable issue.
If you have a lot of Stored Procedures they will get removed on upgrade, this could prove a step too far. iMIS developer ASI (Advanced Systems International) has scripts to run that will highlight non-standard iMIS database objects and additional complexities that might stop an upgrade to Cloud. Being on the latest version of iMIS is a good place to be and unless something else is stopping you this third requirement is a good goal anyway.
Other things to consider:
iMIS Automation
Do you use Task Centre (TC) at your organisation? TC is an iMIS approved automation tool that ASI has sold for many years. It is very flexible and provides a comprehensive set of functionality. However now iMIS has Process Automation as part of the core product. This too is a flexible automation tool which is brilliant for Alert, emails and scheduled tasks. Not quite as powerful as TC it nonetheless could probably take over quite a number of tasks that are currently in TC. The question will be what to do about the rest!
iMIS and Third Party applications
Many third party applications have been re-written to work in iMIS Cloud. iEmail, a popular choice, has several different options depending on how you use Outlook. Higher Logic (Informz) also works with Cloud as does the Top Class LMS to name but a few.
iMIS Benefits
- ASI Cloud is now wholly based on MS Azure offering unparalleled scalability, reliability and performance.
- Rolling updates mean you always have access to the latest released features.
- Hardware and software maintenance is taken care of for you.
- Backups are also taken care of.
- PCI compliance is also registered at the datacentre level.
Why iMIS Summary
What are your issues that you would like iMIS Cloud to solve? Do you suffer from limited IT support locally? PCI audits that drag on and highlight issues? Limited hardware budget? Cloud could certainly be an option in these scenarios however you need to make that choice with your eyes wide open.
Find out more about iMIS Cloud
