Survey - Who is using Max 8? What do you think?

We have been using Maximizer 8 for several months now.

1. We are running a windows NT4.0 domain with Exchange Server 5.5
2. Stability so far 2
3. New features 7

We have had a ton of problems ranging form frequent crashes to features and functions within Maximizer that just do not work or work properly.

1) Maximizer Enterprise v8.0, 30 users, Software Sales
2) Stability is 3 (low)
3) Features 8 (lots of nice features)

They really need to fix the stability problems for this product to shine.
-Tim-

Running 8 with 2 users. Very finicky. Has a mind of its own. Instruction manual is ambigiouse. You have to me a maximizer expert to understand it. I am getting the feeling that this program is designed to make Maximizer money off maintenance contracts and support. You buy the product, and your 30 day complimentary support is limited to nothing more than installation and getting the SAMPLE data up and running. And nothing works properly. Every thing extra is $200 per hour for them to TROUBLE SHOOT and that could cost you the program 5 time over.

It has cost me hours and hours. I had an EXPERT in here for 3 and a half days just trying to get syncronization for 2 users happening via FTP. Finaly got it working and now the remote is crashing along with outlook. Go figure.

Using Max 8 with 35 users, placed in 8 different branches.

-Stability 4- after Service Release 1
-Features 8- A lot of good stuff

Frustrations-
Maximizer does have official support of their own, but rather through Business Partners, which means you sometimes have to wait for the answer. Why do they not have a proper knowledge base where we can posts questions etc.

The development module that they provide to integrate stuff, simply sucks. Everything has to be done one particular way, if not the app crashes. The hooks took us ages to get stable.


I got more answers from reading Maxtalk than their expensive manuals.

The way they use the pervasive database makes it very difficult to integrate data. They still read and write data via btrieve which often creates issues when you start writing with the Pervasive ODBC driver. Just try to write an insert data statement with the pervasive ODBC.

We've been using Max 8 (pervasive) for a couple of months. This is the first time we've used any Maximizer products.

1) Originally running with a mixture of Win2k and XP. Found a lot of crashes with Win2k so now all on XP. Less frequent crashes but still not very stable.

2) Stability is about 3. We have 7 users but they're mostly remotes (normally 2 or 3 users logged on at once).

3) Features are good. Can't comment on new features as no experience with older Maximizer versions. Lots of frustrations with features that don't work properly or need a high degree of database and/or networking expertise to get going.

Entirely agree with Danny and Tobie about documentation (almost useless) and support (non-existent unless you have very deep pockets)

Response to post by Tobie Heyns:

>Maximizer does have official support of their own, but rather
>through Business Partners,

If you meant to say that "Maximizer does not have official support of their own", that is incorrect. Their direct service options are outlined here. However, they prefer that you establish a relationship with a Business Partner (BP) and work with them because the BP often has a more complete understanding of your particular circumstances and therefore can provide better service.

>Why do they not have a proper knowledge base where we can posts
>questions etc.

They do have a Knowledge Base. If you mean a discussion forum where users can post questions, there are many software vendors that don't provide that option directly.

>The development module that they provide to integrate stuff,
>simply sucks.

Compared to what? I must admit that I'm not completely up-to-date on the customization offerings from the other CRM vendors, but Maximizer has always been committed to giving their users and BPs the tools to extend and integrate the product.

>Just try to write an insert data statement with the pervasive
>ODBC.

As discussed elsewhere on this board, that's not the way to do it.

Thanks for putting some issues straight.

Stability: 1/10
Features: 7/10

Environment: Windows 2003 Server, Win XP/2000 clients, 15 workstations.


As IT manager here I have never seen a more unstable product release in my life. Maximizer Enterprise 8 has been the thorn in my side since we have upgraded, users always crashing which translates to MIS people's lives being hell. Im sorry that I had to put it that way. Perhaps I am un-skilled and it is my fault, perhaps something I did wrong in the install, perhaps this or that. Perhaps. If this is the case, fine - BUT this product should not be difficult to get up and running well. As an MIS guy, I dont want to have to hire a Pervasive or Maximizer guy at $300/hr to set this CRM product up when it should be a breeze for someone like myself.

There are a number of very loyal long term users on this board, and a larger number of relatively new users who could be converted to "very loyal long term users" if the people at Max read, pay attention to, and respond to what they read here. The Max folks also need to realize that this is a public board, and their competition can read the comments as well - and can also direct prospects here to read the same comments. For the sake of the software my business depends on, I would like to know the Max folks monitor this board.

Please note that this issue is not exclusive to Max - every software developer in the world has to face it.

Anyway, can anyone confirm/deny Max presence on here? And if it's a confirmation, it should be from an official Max representative. We deserve no less.

- R.

Just upgraded from max 5.0 to max 8. The ONLY reason I upgraded was to use maxlink for my tungsten C as I want to get away from the pc and use the palm 99% of the time. My fault but I expected an "app" on the palm... not a conduit. Palm is rebooting at the end of a sync. I'll give it a few days and if the techs and I cannot solve it I'll be asking for a refund. <sigh> None of this would be happening if Maximizer made available a demo of the maxlink.
Well no refund available. Anyone want to buy my downloaded ver8.0 upgrade? Still about 26 days of support.
"I" managed to get it working. Had to backup, delete any and all apps from the pc, do a hard reset and install maxlink while my palm was basically empty. Then reinstall apps on the pc and restore data. Once I was on hold for so long that a voicemail lady came on, stated the support hours, said they were now closed and disconnected me. This was at 11am PST.

Maximizer definetley needs to work on their customer service themselves. Tech support has been very poor even with a brand new version, 8.0. It takes an hour to talk to a person who has probably been trained for less than half an hour in the support arena.

They have some bright support staff, but heck if you get to talk to them on the free 30- day support line.

ps - as to whether maximizer monitors this board, I dont think they do. However, Gord (the guy that sticks up for Maximizer) is the closest thing to a relationship with Maximizer. I believe Gord is with maximizerconsultants.com

That's a different Gord but don't worry, people have gotten us confused before (eh, Alicia? ).

Hey Gord,

That sounds a LOT more interesting than anything else on this board! Go on, tell us more!!

- Pasta

I must say that after installing SR2 for Enterprise 8, the application is much faster and seems more stable.

My users seem quite happy as well.

We have been using Maximizer Enterprise for 5 or six years.

1. Currently MAx Enterprise 8 SR2 with 20 Users Pervasive SQL on Windows 2000 with mixed clients.)

2. Stability 3 (very poor)

3. New features 5 (when they work)

With each incarnation this product seems to become less stable and more difficult to support. Maintaining 7 remote users is practically a full time job and extremely frustrating. Maximizer support is simply awful - when i had sync problems I was asked to e-mail im detailed logs but they lost these - I guess they must use maximizer to record customer contact.

The recent Version 8 SR2 release is a 700MB download.

Hey MacStout,

Sounds like you have a lot of problems with Max8. Tell me more about your Max Server: what hardware is it running, and is it running anything other than MaxEnt?

20 users on Pervasive peer-peer sounds like quite a heavy usage. What does Task Manager say about CPU usage and spare memory?

- Pasta

It's a new Dell 2000 Server with 1GB RAM and other than storing a few files does little else. As i mentioned before its using Pervasive SQL not peer to peer. I have to schedule stop/start of the pervasive services each evening otherwise it just eats all the RAM. The CPU is rarely busy even when creating Max refreshes,

Are you using the Campaign Manager at all? If you're not using that functionality, nor the email notifications, try turning off the Maximizer services. I did that on my server and noticed a boost. I don't use campaigns, so losing those services was not a big deal.

Jake

No I'm not using these so I have now switched them off. I don't hold out much hope tho' I just checked the server and the ntdbsmgr.exe process is currently using 345MB of RAM and I only have 6 users logged in. The services were reset last night (by scheduled task) to free the RAM.

Thanks for the advice

Try running the Pervasive engine optimiser utility. I stumbled across this a while back.

Wherever you have your SR2 server setup files saved (You mentioned you downloaded from the web), browse to this directory:

\MaxEnt\3rdParty\Pervasive\nt\MxOptmzPerv.exe

I believe you said you're using the client/server engine, so make sure you don't use the same file in the \wge directory.

Just a thought.

Jake

This program is run as part of the Maximizer installation process - I have tried to run it again but it hasn't helped.

Mac

Hi, Mac.

It's not clear to me why you are so concerned about memory usage unless the server is crashing or otherwise behaving badly. You said yourself that it does "little else" other than act as a Maximizer server, so perhaps the Pervasive server engine is taking the memory simply because it is available.

If you're interested, you can look at the "Memory usage" and "Performance tuning" settings for your server in the Pervasive Control Center. You can fiddle with these settings if you like, but doing so is not recommended by Maximizer (or me, unless you're sure you know what you're doing).

Other comments on previous posts:

- The SR2 download is ~700MB because it is a copy of the complete CD. They decided to release it that way instead of a patch. (Why? I don't know.)

- Except for the MS_SQL versions of Maximizer they all use Pervasive.SQL, either the Workgroup version or the client/server version. There is no "peer to peer" option any more - it has been replaced by the Workgroup version.

Gord wrote:

===
Except for the MS_SQL versions of Maximizer they all use Pervasive.SQL, either the Workgroup version or the client/server version. There is no "peer to peer" option any more - it has been replaced by the Workgroup version.
===

Which is really what I meant: sorry fo rbeing sloppy. Are you using Workgroup or Client/Server? At 20 users plus remote syncronization, you probably ought to be on client server, either Pervasive or MS_SQL.

Hello Gord

I only mentioned the memory problem because PsychoPasta asked me to check the statistics (see previous post). If I leave the server alone as you suggest it simply runs out of memory and grinds to a halt, leaving all my max users stuck. This is only one of numerous problems - my main issues are with maxexchange and remote clients.

I followed the ugrade instructions for SR2 precisely and When i installed SR2 to the maxexchange server all remotes reported that the server had changed it's address from maximizer@abcdef.com to maximizer@abcd. and were given the choice to accept this or ignore the packet. If they accepted it maxexchange hung if they ignore it no updates are processed.

I then checked the Exchange server manager and the address was displayed correctly. I then edited the address to mx@adcdef.com to overcome the truncation problem but I still got "server has changed it's address messages" and crashes. In the end I had to re-build all remotes before they would synchronize properly (several days work). I had numerous cases where I thought that the remotes were working but they simply remove the packets from Outlook and put them in the maxexchange inbox but don't process the changes (no error message displayed). Remotes I have rebuilt have sections of their calendar misssing.

I only installed SR2 because of the problems we were having with SR1 and I know from bitter experience that if I report the problem to maximizer they will tell me to upgrade to the latest service release.

Sorry to go on but i am extremely frustrated by this product and can see from this forum that I am not alone.

MacStout (Maxxed Out - did you get it?)

I have been a loyal Maximizer customer for almost 10 years. I started with Maximizer 3.0, loved it, upgraded to Maximizer 5 a few years later and recently upgraded again to Maximizer 8.

It is a great relief to see that I am not alone in my frustration at using Maximizer, which in my opinion is a very promising customer relationship management product that suffers from significant instability problems and abismal corporate support.

I really like how Maximizer integrates with QuickBooks, Palm, and Outlook and I have been struggling for a long time to get these applications to cooperate in a stable manner.

Perhaps together the Maximizer user community can finally put an end to the unfortunate situation we have found ourselves in, namely, paying for a product that promises a lot but doesn't deliver and being stuck with unfriendly, overpriced paid support as our only recourse.

Kudos to Maxtalk!

tarantula

Using Windows 2000 back-office server, with XP PC's
Stability on Remotes 0/10;
Stability on desktops 4/10
Features as described 8/10, one's that actually work well 5/10
I am in South Africa and was charged a fortune for the licences which included a set-up fee. Because the installer company took three days instead of 4 hours (the amount of time I'm guessing they budgeted for) they simply scrapped the idea of the set-up fee and charged an hourly rate and sent a bill for 6 times the setup fee. We refused to pay of course based on their clauses in their own invoice. Really wish I'd know about this site before I spent my money!

Henners, I can't speak to Citrix, but I can say we use Max with Terminal Services and it seems to work fine. Tough to get going, but it appears a number of people have gone that route so even if Max doesn't officially support it, the users may be able to give you what you need should you decide to explore that option.

In regards to your comments about back end design, I have often heard that Max is simply a single user product with a multi-user layer kludged over top. I'm not a DBA, but am somewhat technical - and I can say that based on their Administrator tools (security and user ID management) I'd have to agree.

However, as a business owner/user, it gives our people what they need a lot quicker and easier than the alternatives I've tried (see Act vs Max thread in Maximizer Features). And really, it's the business use that deliv3ers the value, no?

- R.

- R.

We have been using Max 8 since mid-2004

1. Running mainly Win XP Pro/Home. Pervasive engine (workgroup), SR3 (series 1444). 7 users, almost all remotes. Electronics industry.
2. Stability on SR3 is better - now maybe up to 6.
3. Can't comment on new features as we never used Max 7.x but I can tell you that the main reason for choosing Max 8 Enterprise was the remote sync capability, which works fairly well until it glitches. We found that its quicker to give somebody a complete new refresh and manually re-enter their updates rather than try to fix a remote which crashed when it tries to sync.

Overall Max 8 gives us the functionality we need especially with the remote sync-ing and the ability to share the database and calendar viewing. We're not too unhappy ...

1)Maximizer 8 eCRM, HP Dual P4 3Ghz, 2GB RAM, 21 users, Manufacturing, MS SQL, Windows 2003 Standard.

2)5 - going on 2 months with maxexchange issues keeping us from sending refreshes.

3)Give it a 6 only because of time spent troubleshooting issues, haven't had time to spend on new features, but from what it's supposed to do,and the few we have used it's about a 6

Henners; You mentioned this manual, where can I get it?

Oh ya dittos on everything that been said in this post topic.

quote:

I was thinking of creating some Ad-Hoc reports, but because there is no obvious way that the tables relate to eachother you have to purchase a manual, $30, that will explain the database.

Hi, Scott.

You can purchase the manual either from your local Maximizer Business Partner or directly from Maximizer Software.

http://www.maximizer.com/contact/index.html

.

Gord, I appreciate your response to my inquiry but I cringed when you said
[quote]You can purchase the manual either from your local Maximizer Business Partner or directly from Maximizer Software.[quote]

The reason is this: they just told me that for me to understand the relationship between the databases so that I can write a simple Crystal report that tells me which Customer Service cases are chargeable, I would need to buy their Customization Suite. This company is a joke, their service is a joke, and anyone who continues to buy from them is a fool. I am canning $2400 worth of software because this type of business behavior is right out of the dark ages. I will in every instance preach against anyone making a business decision to purchase this software or deal with this company based on my 12 months of experience. Their sales rep even stated she couldn't believe what they were telling her.


Signed "Done with Maximizer"

Hey, Scott - why not try the $30 manual approach before trashing the $2400 investment? I think we've all found in the past that a developer may say "this is what you must do", but given our own technical knowledge (perhaps supplemented with a bit of help from a knowledgeable Business Partner?) we can do more with less.

I'm not condoning anyone's business behaviour, just thinking of salvaging an investment.

- R.

1) Max 8.0 / single user on Dell Laptop Win XP Pro / freight & logistics industry.

2) Stability = a 5 - average

3) New Features = a 5 - average ( over Max 7.0 )

but I would really like to hear what the advantages are of upgrading to Max 8.0 Enterprise. Is it worth it ?

Does the Strategy wizard actually do something on Enterprise ?

Also, my employer is thinking of installing a CRM package for at least 6 users, using a Dell Server with 1 Gb RAM and Windows XP Pro for everyone.

They are just coming out of the very dark age, reluctantly, but I'm nervous about recommending something which appears to be so unstable on networks.

Salesmen in the field will need to use this product, then synchronise via server ( when coming to the office I guess ).....any recommendataions on best way to implement this, if at all, would be appreciated.

Sage is used extensively for accounting and their ACT package although not as good, has been recommended as much more stable.

Rooster,

The issue here is I called them to buy the manual and was told I had to buy the suite. When I asked to talk to the next one up this chain of command I was told that they were busy but would call me back soon. As you can guess no one has called me back.

I appreciate the suggestion about not trashing $2400 worth of software and its still chugging away providing us the same thing it was last week but I won't be upgrading to the next version and I am starting a needs analysis for our next CRM suite.

quote:

Originally posted by Rooster:
Hey, Scott - why not try the $30 manual approach before trashing the $2400 investment? I think we've all found in the past that a developer may say "this is what you must do", but given our own technical knowledge (perhaps supplemented with a bit of help from a knowledgeable Business Partner?) we can do more with less.

I'm not condoning anyone's business behaviour, just thinking of salvaging an investment.

- R.

We are fairly new users having started to use Maximizer Enterprise at version 8 in January 2005.

1) We only have 3 users and we're a software house. We did have a fair bit of experience in developing and setting up software.

2) Stability is not bad but we are nowhere near pushing the limits of the product.

3) Features? Getting things to work is the challenge...!

A couple of gripes:

Coming into this product at version 8 is a nightmare. The documentation is probably OK if you have been using Maximizer for the last 5 releases, but for a new user... forget it. The product is a loose connection of programs which have settings all over the place and you need to be a battle scarred veteran to have an idea of what else you need to change and/or set to get things working.

Setting up MaxExchange is a nightmare. Again too many different settings placed in random places. Even the "high" levels of error logging do not tell you what is going wrong.

Integration with Outlook... Do I really want to live in Maximizer all day - No. I want to use it and then go back into Outlook, but I can't because Maximizer confuses Outlook (2003) such that it can't open any folders and I have to reboot the PC! :-(

Single user refugee from Act 2005. I now have purchased Maximizer 8 and spend some time each day tring to learn it, but finding Maximizer much harder to learn (but might be good once learned) than all the other contact management packages I've tried. I'm using with Time & Chaos for now, but interested in learning how Maximizer 8 provides more capabilites. Only making progress because of this forum (thank you) - manual was of limited help.

Ok, we run 25 user Maximizer Enterprise Pervasive configuration on Windows XP clients connected to a Windows 2003 server. To add a bit of potential stress to the mix, we have 10 o fthe 25 users connecting via Terminal Server 2003...Stablity is good and performance is fine. We use it constantly.

Regrads
greg