Is Maintenace Plan really worth it?

Does everyone pay for annual maintenance plan every year? At 18% of the original cost, if you have HQ and multiple store, that's quite a lot of money. All you get is service packs and access to CustomerSource which are not absolutely necessary to operate your stores...It's hard to believe that everyone pays for this every year.

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zzee
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I'll put my 2 cents in here, but I'm sure many will disagree.

I have only let my maintenance lapse once in 6 years and that was simply an oversight. Most of the time maintenance seems like it is a waste of money. The same as any insurance plan you have. But there have been a few times where it has saved my butt. Most recently when my POS machines hard drive failed and I built a new system and upgraded to 2.0. By updating to 2.0 I also had to update my manager machine in the back. seemed simple enough until the install failed saying it was unable to remove a previous install so it couldn't go forward. So I completely uninstalled RMS 1.3 and manually removed everything in the registry related to RMS. It still failed. I tried several more times to no avail. I finally opened a support request, only the second one ever for me I believe. Within 30 minutes I had the solution, which was a little utility that fixed corrupted windows install files. The fix was done in 2 minutes and the install went flawlessly the rest of the way. That turned out to be a very big return on my maintenance investment. There also have been numerous service packs and hotfixes along the way.

Another big plus is the availability of self support Knowledge base articles. I have used many of the custom reports available and also used the info in quite a few of the KB articles. I have also seen many users request the stuff I pay for for free from the newsgroups. They are completely at a loss sometimes and ask for a handout from the users that have paid for access. I have no sympathy for them, they have the same plan available to them as I do but they choose to not use it, to their regret sometimes. A retail POS system is an investment in your business, $225 a year(or whatever you would pay depending on your licenses) is minimal to have access to such support. The one request I talked about earlier is enough to convince me of its value. You also have the option of paying for support from your partner you got the software from. In most cases it is a lot more, but will usually give you better support. If you go that route I don't think you would need Microsoft's plan since everything would probably be supplied from your partner.

Last but not least, there is supposedly a fairly good feature pack due to be released later this year(hopefully) That will improve the POS usability and appearance. If you are on maintenance from MS you will automatically receive it when it is released. I know there are a lot of people that disagree on the value of BRAP simply because MS has gone a year or more sometimes without any updates or fixes, which can be frustrating. If everything's going smoothly you never see the value in this kind of stuff, but the minute you are back up and running after a hiccup with the system, you immediately thank your lucky stars you decided to pay for it.

Craig

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Craig Wood

Reply to
Richard

Does everyone pay for annual maintenance plan every year? At 18% of the original cost, if you have HQ and multiple store, that's quite a lot of money. All you get is service packs and access to CustomerSource which are not absolutely necessary to operate your stores...It's hard to believe that everyone pays for this every year.

Reply to
cptsoft

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