We were surprised but not entirely disappointed to learn today (Thursday 6th May 2021) that Sage is pulling the plug on ‘Sage Drive’! For those not fully up to speed with Sage 50cloud Accounts terminology… Sage Drive is the ‘cloud’ element of Sage 50cloud Accounts that was relabelled as Remote Data Access in v27. Originally released in October 2020, Sage v27 featured a significant change to the way Remote Data Access is managed.
In earlier verions, Sage Drive access was managed via the Sage Drive Management Centre, a web portal that you signed into with your Sage ID, typically following a link from inside your Sage 50cloud Accounts Desktop software program. From v27 the remote access controls are embedded into the User Management section inside the desktop software application.
Sage have today announced that from 17th June 2021, the ‘cloud’ element (Remote Data Access) of Sage 50cloud Accounts will only be available to subscription paying customers running the current version (v27.x) of their benchmark small business accounting package.
As a Sage Developer Partner specialising in Sage Integration products, Hyperext welcomes this change as it will help to clear up a lot of user confusion that has been created with the change in terminology and the associated changes in user experience.
Although it does make the name of our hosted REST API service for Sage 50cloud Accounts seem a little bit orphaned. We will stick with HyperDrive for now as HyperAccess doesn’t quite have the same ring to it!
The timing of this news from Sage coincides with the planned release of our fully automated ‘click-and-connect’ HyperDrive service, which as it happens, we were only planning to make available for users of Sage 50cloud Accounts v27.