iPhone connect for Sage 50

OK so what is the Sage 50 Remote Viewer and how does it work?

There are essentially two parts the solution;

  • A server based application which talks to your Sage data
  • An iphone app which will be able to talk to the server based application

The biggest issues when designing for mobile are screen size and data. Obviously you are fairly constrained with displaying information on a small screen. The iphone is pretty good at this however by showing table data that scrolls and multiple pages using a navigation system of buttons that allow you to go forward and backward in screens.

The issue of data is one of delivering just what you need, when you need it as you may not be on a fast connection. The customers, suppliers and products are accessed via a simple A-Z (and 0-9) selection so it quckly narrows down what you want to see.

For those technically inclined the solution will comprise of the following;

  • A stand-alone HTTP server which will handle incoming requests
  • This server will also query the Sage data using ODBC and create index pages of typically 25-50 records
  • The server will handle incoming requests in REST format and query the data and return it in JSON format
  • The iphone app will parse the JSON and display it
  • The iphone app will utilise a navigation style interface with several UITableViews to render the data
  • Additionally the iphone app will use coredata to store favourite records from either customer/supplier/stock/orders for quick retrieval

Quick Update! (12th February 2010)

Here are some screen shots to show you how work is progressing, first we have the server component, this will simply be a single executable that you install and you are good to go. It listens on port 88 so it wont interfere with any other webservers you are running (and you can change the port number anyway). The first tab is simply a log which records all incoming requests;
Sage 50 iPhone Server
The second screen is where you provide some preferences with regards to sort order and your user credentials for logging on to Sage 50. Like I mentioned above you dont need any additonal licenses to run this, you could in theory have 100 connections running off of the same username and password and that user could be logged in as well.
Sage 50 iPhone Server

So what does it look like on the phone? Like this!
Sage 50 iPhone Home ScreenSage 50 iPhone Index ScreenSage 50 iPhone Data Screen

Final Update (27th March 2010)
The application is now ready! You can download the app from the app store by clicking the logo below.

The server portion is available is a self-install for £99+VAT. The self install option comes with setup instructions but you will need to get your IT person to enable access to the machine running the server from outside of your LAN/firewall. You can buy a copy of the server component by clicking the ‘Buy Now’ button below where you will receive an email with a link to download it.


S50 Remote on the App Store