What is recommended for the "Main Site" ?

Hi folks,

I've inherited an incomplete Sage 50c rollout and I'm having a bit of a hard time getting my head around how Sage manages the dataset. I foolishly assumed that, being the Cloud version, all company, account and user data was stored centrally on Sage servers somewhere and that the local client software read and wrote to these servers. Not so it seems! Our Sage partner stuck multi-company Sage 50c onto one of our "out-of-office" employees laptops and now as we start adding users, installing the software on more machines and enabling additional features - we're seeing a lot of "Main site offline" ... "LAPTOP-XYZ is offline", etc!

Obviously the above situation is not tenable.

We are multi-company, 4 to 5 users spread across 2 fixed locations and then some road warriors. Should I purchase a standalone PC, install the Data Service, make it the Main Site and the pop it in one of our offices and keep it running 24/7? Or might a Windows server on AWS or Azure running the Data Service work?

What setup does Sage or others here recommend for hosting the Main Site?

Thanks

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    Even if you did set up a PC or server to hold the main dataset, with the service and a copy of Sage installed, you would still be relying on Sage Drive to synchronize your data between the main dataset and the other users. In my experience, this is less than ideal, given the vagaries of internet connections and the Sage Drive service not always being available. One possible alternative is to install Sage, the service, and the main dataset onto a server on a local network, let local users connect directly to it via a mapped drive and let remote users and road warriors connect to it via Microsoft remote desktop, which is built in to Windows. This has the benefit that everybody is always working in the latest, current version of the data, there is no synchronization delay, and if the connection drops there is no loss of data, since RDP is just a remote screen and keyboard to a user on the server. The downside is that it is more complicated to set up, and you need TS CAL'S (Terminal Server Client Access Licences) for the remote users. BUT, and again in my experience, it is solid and reliable, sadly something that Sage Drive can only aspire to.

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  • 0

    Even if you did set up a PC or server to hold the main dataset, with the service and a copy of Sage installed, you would still be relying on Sage Drive to synchronize your data between the main dataset and the other users. In my experience, this is less than ideal, given the vagaries of internet connections and the Sage Drive service not always being available. One possible alternative is to install Sage, the service, and the main dataset onto a server on a local network, let local users connect directly to it via a mapped drive and let remote users and road warriors connect to it via Microsoft remote desktop, which is built in to Windows. This has the benefit that everybody is always working in the latest, current version of the data, there is no synchronization delay, and if the connection drops there is no loss of data, since RDP is just a remote screen and keyboard to a user on the server. The downside is that it is more complicated to set up, and you need TS CAL'S (Terminal Server Client Access Licences) for the remote users. BUT, and again in my experience, it is solid and reliable, sadly something that Sage Drive can only aspire to.

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