I can vouch for best of both worlds… We are “On Prem” in our own Azure private cloud infrastructure and I’m very happy with that for now.
But we do have our eye on going to SaaS in maybe 3 years, assuming the price comes down and the quality goes up. I want to see the whole “Portal” thing with environment management features come to life and a couple more years of Kinetic UI maturity before we take a serious look. Not to mention, I’d much rather watch from the sidelines and let the chaos of Classic Client deprecation blow over… As others have said, when you are SaaS you are a beta tester.
But that’s easy for me to say when we already have an Azure infrastructure and resources to support it. Many companies don’t and for them SaaS is a better option despite its issues.
We are also in the process of moving from E10 on-prem to Kinetic Cloud and are currently in the testing/training phase. The plan is to have all users work in Chrome with Kinetic forms and just a couple of exceptions will have the Smart Client installed and made available if needed for limited exceptions of Classic forms. Also, Edge Agent will be installed only where needed, IE requires auto-print pack slip, while all others will do Print-Preview first. I find Kinetic in browser to be much faster than Smart Client and using Kinetic forms much faster than loading Classic forms. Also, per Epicor, the Smart Client will be sunset in 2026. The response of users at first glance was “wow/worried” as the navigation/appearance of E10 classic vs Kinetic is very different but quickly they grasped the navigation and are giving very positive feedback.
Here’s some test scripts from Epicor for switching to the Kinetic. MODERATOR REMOVED We can’t share Epicor documents here, point them to where you found them in EpicWeb or the Sort. - MOD
The other is creating a dashboard to track users creating sales orders, jobs, etc and also part transactions - then you know people are in the system testing.
Other approach is have a central checklist that users would note when they test.
We are also on-prem and have been hesitant for cloud due to the volume of customizations we have and what our upgrades require in terms of testing and uplifting some of our more problematic customizations. Are you heavy or moderate for customizations?