In My Personal Opinion:
The reason it’s so difficult is because MAS is built on Mid-1990s technology and they have, until very recently, almost completely neglected to update it. MAS is an old dead horse that Sage rode the heck out of and put away wet each night. At some point they woke up to find the horse about dead and now they are trying desperately to breathe new life into it by finally giving it a somewhat modern overhaul.
VI is nothing but a stop-gap, band-aid solution to the real problem of integration. It, along with the promise of a full set of BOI objects, is the carrot Sage is dangling to keep its customers around long enough to bring MAS into early 21st century computing. You shouldn’t have to attend classes and conferences to be able to insert/update a PO record. Having integration objects, documentation and some coding examples should be enough.
My personal feeling on this matter is that people should stay away from VI unless there is an immediate/imperative need and the current set of completed BOIs is not enough… and even then I would recommend at least toying with the idea of moving to another modern accounting package.
Even after the BOIs are complete and the underlying data structure is rewritten, it still has an interface that is neither attractive nor intuitive.
There are better products in today’s software market.
The only good thing I have to say about MAS, is that its data structure (seemingly) is quite nicely designed to maintain historical data.
