SunSystems 5.4. Why is it urgent to migrate?

News November 11, 2019

For many years, Seventh-day Adventist organizations have enjoyed the stability and efficiency of Infor SunSystems 5.4. Back in 2002, the Seventh-day Adventist Church Headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland decided to sponsor and promote this software so that the Church’s offices worldwide could also benefit from it. Over the following decade the GC’s SunPlus Team added great features and functionalities, making this software one of the best, most robust software packages the Church has ever used for accounting. SunSystems 5.4 users working in ten Church Divisions spread across the world could not be happier with this tool.

Because SunSystems is a commercial software, it is constantly being upgraded and developed to include better functionality. The Church is committed to providing these upgrades to its system users. In 2015 the GC SunPlus Team started a campaign to encourage all SunPlus organizations to migrate from the now-dated 5.4 version to newer versions like 6.2 or 6.3. Despite our best efforts, today, 4 years after the start of our upgrade campaign, many SunPlus organizations continue to use version 5.4.

Organizations that have been reluctant to upgrade argue that version 5.4 offers stability, speed of operation, and is a solid platform when properly implemented. Why should we move to a newer version, they ask, if SunSystems 5.4 is still working very nicely?

It is urgent for all organizations to upgrade from SunSystems 5.4 to newer versions for the following reasons:

  1. According to Infor, all license sales and additional-user license orders of SunSystems 5.4 will be discontinued effective June 1, 2014. That means Infor will continue renewing licenses for sites already running 5.4 but no new licenses will be issued.
  2. In the current release of SunSystems, version 6.x, Infor has replaced Actuate with SunSystems Reporting Services (SRS), based on the industry-standard Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Infor believes SRS is easy to use and provides a more accessible reporting environment with improved functionality. This change in SunSystems 6.x is a product advancement that can help improve our users’ reporting experience, and – probably more importantly – Actuate, the report writing tool used by SunSystems 5.4, is no longer supported by Infor. Any new bugs that may result from other software upgrades can no longer be reported to Infor.
  3. Although Infor is still supporting SunSystems 5.4, it no longer releases updates and fixes for that version. Running software that is no longer receiving security patches and improvements is not recommended.
  4. According to Infor’s official document number 51827 Infor SunSystems – Platform Support Matrix, SunSystems 5.4 is supported on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 only.  For SQL, Version 2005 and 2008 are the only versions supported. Microsoft officially ended support for SQL 2008 in July 2019, (See: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlreleaseservices/end-of-mainstream-support-for-sql-server-2008-and-sql-server-2008-r2/) and they are planning to end support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 on January 14, 2020 (See: https://support.microsoft.com/en-za/help/4456235/end-of-support-for-windows-server-2008-and-windows-server-2008-r2). Based on this fact, we strongly recommend migrating any system running any of these software packages to a newer version ASAP. SunSystems 5.4 is not supported on versions higher than Windows 2008 or SQL 2008. If the site migrates from Windows 2008 and SQL 2008/2005, they will have to upgrade SunSystems to version 6.2, 6.3, or 6.4.

Based on the reasons outlined above, the SunPlus Team strongly recommends all SunPlus organizations to upgrade to SunSystems 6.2, 6.3, or 6.4 as soon as possible.