When is an upgrade not an upgrade? When MicrOpay v5 wipes all user settings

David M Williams
Thursday, 14 May 2009 19:11

IT Industry - Development

MicrOpay customers have found that the morning after upgrading brings about help desk calls from beleaguered payroll teams asking where all their bookmarked screens and form settings have gone to.

Even something as fundamental as printing payslips has required a double look with pay officers finding their configurations for what should and should not be included, along with paper size settings, have all been lost.

Calling Sage MicrOpay support gave the news that Meridian v5 uses a new registry key, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\SageMicropay, with the help desk cautioning that all Meridian users must have read/write access to that registry key.

Previously, Meridian v4 stored its settings per user in the HKEY_LOCAL_USER registry area.

I asked MicrOpay if they had any advice or comment on this matter and if there was a fix. The response from a manager within the organisation replied,

“Unfortunately this was specific to this upgrade because in V5 they changed the location of where it looks for the registry keys. The keys aren't there so it creates defaults instead.

Normally we don't change the location of registry keys however for this upgrade we had to move them.

Hopefully the registry keys won't have to be moved again and therefore this shouldn't happen again.

Apologies for the inconvenience."

It surprises me that a large software company is so blasé about simply ignoring every single user setting and customisation, effectively turning the product upgrade into a fresh installation.

I questioned why the developers felt a need to change the location where settings are stored, and why they did not include any means to migrate existing settings, but received no response.

MicrOpay customers be warned; the version 5 upgrade has a pitfall that is not stated nor expected and the attitude from the company strongly indicates a lack of concern or regard, or even forethought.

The upgrade is not an optional one, however, because the current version is not guaranteed to be compliant with taxation legislation come July 1st.