Anyone working remotely these days? (Thought I’d open with a joke.)

In all seriousness though, being able to work remotely is a technological godsend.  However, it’s not always all it’s cracked up to be, especially when your Sage 100 system is running sluggishly.  It can be so incredibly frustrating.  But don’t worry, there’s a number of options to consider in an effort to speed things up.

Move Sage 100 to the Cloud – Cloud at Work Hosting for Sage 100

First, and especially in light of the current environment, there has never been a stronger case for hosting your Sage 100 in the cloud. Cloud at Work hosting for Sage 100 provides end-users high performance, secure, anytime, access with 99.99% guaranteed availability. Your entire Sage 100 production environment will be hosted in a stable and secure environment with 24x7x365 monitoring, support and hourly back.

Hosting Sage 100 in the cloud takes all the work out of running, maintaining & backing up your Sage 100 and  provides: Redundancy & Disaster Recovery, System Performance, Security, Consistency of Data and Reporting.

Join this upcoming webinar with Cloud at Work to learn more: Power of the Cloud: Why Migrate Sage 100 to the Cloud or visit here for more information.

If there are reasons at this time not to consider a move to the cloud, first off, be aware that in general running Sage 100 over a VPN (Virtual Private Network) isn’t necessarily the ideally recommended method since performance could be compromised, although it typically runs better with the ‘Advanced’ version of Sage 100.

• Sage 100 ‘Standard’: Technically the ‘Standard’ version is not supported when running over a VPN or WAN (Wide Area Network), as per the Supported Platform Matrix doc – Standard (SPM).  Now that’s not to say it won’t work, but slow performance wouldn’t be too surprising.  And although it might work “okay”, you may find it especially slow when printing/previewing Crystal Reports-related reports/forms (but also in general including data entry screens, etc. where screens slowly come up / paint the screen).
• Sage 100 ‘Advanced’ (Client/Server): One of the first things to try if experiencing slow VPN performance when running ‘Advanced’ is to implement the ‘Client/Server ODBC Driver’ for Sage 100 (C/S ODBC).  This should at least help a little but unfortunately there’s no guarantee on if and how much performance will improve.  So this may not be a complete cure-all as it’s dependent on the internet connection/speed on both ends, but usually it does provide some better performance.  See this Supported Platform Matrix doc – Advanced (SPM) for further VPN-related info.
  • The Sage 100 Client/Server ODBC Driver components “allows remote workstations to process worktables using server-side ODBC processing.  Report rendering is completed using a locally cached copy of the form or report and a local Crystal Reports print engine.  Remote workstations running over a WAN link connected through a VPN are ideal candidates for using the C/S ODBC Driver.  Forms and reports will print significantly faster from remote workstations.  The server-side configuration can be done as a Service or Application.”
• Sage 100 ‘Premium’ (SQL):  May have similar limitations as ‘Standard’, and therefore similar options.  See this Supported Platform Matrix doc – Premium (SPM) for further VPN-related info.

Watch Recorded Webinar:
Enabling Your Team to Work Remotely in Sage 100 with the Impact from COVID-19 & FFCRA

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Other Options:

For ‘Standard’, and even ‘Advanced’ (and possibly ‘Premium’), here are some options to consider:

• Possibly use Remote Desktop Services or Citrix setup.
• Consider a ‘desktop remote access tool’ like LogMeIn or GoToMyPC for access to a workstation.
• Increase bandwidth on either end.
• If running ‘Standard’, you could always consider switching to ‘Advanced’, which is some cases you may be eligible for that at no additional software cost; services to migrate from Standard to Advanced and implement C/S ODBC are roughly estimated at 4hr.
• And although it can be a bit risky and undesirable, lastly you may need to consider allowing remote access directly to the Sage 100 server.