Technical Issue - Staff cannot run Sage 50 Accounts v28 without "Run as administrator"

SOLVED

Hi everyone,

We've had this problem consistently since introducing Sage 50 Accounts v28. We utilise an RDS system to allow staff to access Sage. The infrastructure is setup with a gateway and 4 session hosts. Separately, we have a file server that houses the sage data. All upto date vrsions of the data and accounts services are installed in all cases. All windows patches are installed and up to date.

As it stands nw, only domain administrators can run the Sage v28 application by just duoble clicking the desktop icon. For most of our staff, we (domain administrators) have to remote onto their RDS sessions and run as admin using our credentials, which is not best practise or feasilbe in the long term.

Sage Support's resposne to this was flippant, unhelpful and frankly unprofessional. They simply said "make the users administrators, it's an environmental issue - so we cannot help". All other versions of Sage (v27 and earlier) run without issue, it is only v28 that has this issue.

When running the program as a normally, the splash screen appears, and then pops up after hanging for a bit and says "The data service used by Sage Accounts needs to be updated." Click on check for updates does nothing. You have to force close the program. I suspect some change to sage (probably the cryptographic addition to the data service) has caused the issue.

I have exhausted all troubleshooting options I cna find from the community and Sage's KB. I need additional support here - we cannot add admin acces for staff onto the RDS, it's against our compliance requirements, and is just generally not best practise. We need staff to be able to run this software as a normal non administrator user.

TIA for any support you can offer here. Please note that I have already been through mutiple KBs and applied all recommended fixes, checked all permissions and verified all pre requisites ahead of time, I need more advanced troubleshooting than simply "Have you tried XYZ recommendation in this KB".

Top Replies

  • +1
    verified answer
    As it stands nw, only domain administrators can run the Sage v28 application by just duoble clicking the desktop icon. For most of our staff, we (domain administrators) have to remote onto their RDS sessions and run as admin using our credentials, which is not best practise or feasilbe in the long term.

    Being able to run as an admin user but not a standard user would most commonly imply a permissions issue. But this message does not suggest permissions being the problem:

    When running the program as a normally, the splash screen appears, and then pops up after hanging for a bit and says "The data service used by Sage Accounts needs to be updated." Click on check for updates does nothing

    That message would normally only appear if the local version of the application is newer than the version of the data service that hosts the data you are attempting to connect to. If that were the case (which it does not sound like if you have all available updates installed) then I'd expect everyone to get the same message regardless of being admin or not, assuming you are attempting to connect to the same data path/server in both cases. 

    A few things to check on initially:

    - Are normal users able to connect to the demo or practice data?

    - Are normal users able to to browse the file share or mapped drive location of the data in Windows Explorer? If they can, are they able to create a text file in that path, again simply via Windows Explorer using right click - > New -> Text Document? Can they edit the file simply using Notepad and save changes to it OK, and can they delete the file.

    - Can a normal user connect to the data service port of the server that is hosting the data? A simple test of this would be to run the following from a command prompt:

    telnet "your data server name or IP address" 32228

    That assumes that you have the telnet client feature installed on Windows of course.

    - Similarly can you connect to the control service (which uses a different port)?

    telnet "your data server name or IP address" 34228


    Beyond that I would work under the assumption that the issue is still permissions related somehow but not seeing anything obvious then I would suggest running Process Monitor and filtering on the process name being SBDDesktop.exe and the result being ACCESS_DENIED to see if that helps to provide any indications of what a normal user is unable to access.

    Hope that helps

  • 0 in reply to Darron Cockram

    Turned out to be access to a logfile in C:\programdata\sage\accounts\sage uk data service\logs

    turned out that Sage's installed had set access to the logfile and set domain users to deny create files / append data. meaning a daily log file couldn't be created. the software responds by saying the data service is out of date.

    Thank you for the nudge in the right direction.

  • 0 in reply to David Bevan

    Glad to hear it is sorted.

    turned out that Sage's installed had set access to the logfile and set domain users to deny create files / append data

    Wasn't aware of the installer setting any access rights on that folder but I'll see if I can find out for sure.

    the software responds by saying the data service is out of date

    That sounds like a bug and the error message should be indicating the real reason for the connection error and not incorrectly sending you down the update route. I'll see if I can replicate and get a bug logged for it.