Sage 300 CRE Best Practices in Cloud Workspace (Data Drive)

Applies to: Sage 300, Cloud Workspace customers.
Prerequisites: Admin Access enabled user account.

Introduction

For Sage 300 CRE deployments, depending on the amount of users that your customer will have - we recommend different deployments.

For small customers (~5 users), we can use a single server to host the data as well as run the client.

For larger customers, we will deploy a data server, and then the appropriate amount of application (terminal) servers to support the user sessions.

We can accommodate user growth by just simply adding additional application servers as the user count rises.

This Knowledge Base article will cover how the program is set up, where the data is stored, what Swizznet is backing up, and what you need to do as the partner.

Cloud Workspace Server

Administrative Access

When you log in to the server using the management portal (https://manage.swizznet.com), you are accessing the server as a local administrative user. You will have full admin rights to the server(s) for that customer.

Installation

For Sage 300 CRE installations, the customers data must reside on the E:\data location. Please note that E:\data\customercode gets mapped as H:\ to the end users.

Some of our partners install the data under the customercode folder, while others prefer to put it up one level so it is not visible in the drive mapping.

The partner can still share the folder out and make it accessible for only certain users.

Example: As the admin user, I have configured my Sage sample data to live at E:\data\Sage, and then shared the folder out as Sage (with the correct Sage permissions on the share). From there, I added that UNC path within Sage 300 CRE. 

Mapped Drives

We map folders out as drive letters for the customers, where as the Admin users (partners) will not see them the same way. Here is a list of our default mapped drives, and what their purpose is.

Z:\ - Within Cloud Workspace, every user will get a personal drive that is only visible to them. This can be used to store private documents, etc. E:\pro\companycode\username

H:\ - This mapped drive is the shared data location for the server. All users will have access to this, and this is a place to store common folders, documents that all of the users must access, etc. The physical location of this share is, E:\data\companycode\

F:\ This mapped drive is the location where data uploaded via FTP will be stored. Typically this would be used during the migration period. E:\ftp\companycode\

All of the data stored in all of these locations will take up space on the customers billable data drive. Our default Sage 100 Contractor builds have 20GB of disk space, but this can be increased by contacting sales. Please note, that we can expand data drives, but not shrink them. 

Shares

You can create shares as needed on the server. We understand that customers needs vary and that some of your users may be used to browsing through the company files, where as some may not be technical enough to do so. By default, when adding a new company, Sage will create a Share so that users can access that companies files. Please note, if you create a share, ensure that Everyone is given Full Control on the Share permissions as well as the Security permissions. This is required by Sage. Upon a standard Sage 300 CRE install, the following shares are created automatically. 

UNC Browsing Disallowed

We do not allow UNC pathing from the run menu, or through File Explorer. The reasoning for this is because we disallow "run" commands, it also blocks this. Unfortunately there is no way around it due to Windows OS limitations. If you want your users to be able to browse through to the actual UNC share for Timberline Office, we recommend creating a shortcut and placing it at the root of the H:\ drive.

Please note that this does not cause any issues with Sage accessing the share via UNC, it's just through File Explorer.

Working With Sage

Accessing SQL

If you have a need for a SQL instance, let us know when ordering the server and we can preinstall an instance for you. If this is done, a SA user created for you to access the server as sysadmin.

The password is in a text file on the server, located in C:\Software\SA Password.txt

Sage Replicator

To set up replicator we follow Sage guidelines. Single server workspaces using US region, you can just use the default setting. If it is a multi-server build we will need to create a domain service account. 

For the Run-As account, you can leave it as Default if the SQL Server instance is local, and your server’s regional setting is for the United States. Otherwise:

  • If the SQL Server instance is remote, set the Run-As Account to Other and enter a Windows domain user ID with administrative privileges on the remote server and the accounting server.
  • For Canadian and Australian installations, set the Run-As Account to Other and enter the Windows credentials for a user whose region is set to the appropriate country. See “About Canadian and Australian installations”

Linking Sage Users to Active Director Users

When it comes time to link Sage users to Active Directory the partner will need to log in via signin.swizznet.com or via the CWS client via Remote App, or the full RDS Desktop with normal end user credentials. This way, you are logged in as a domain user who can read/query the domain for users.

  1. Log into Sage with a user who has the ability to manage security, navigate to Security Administration

  2. Select New User Setup
  3. Either create a new account or modify an existing user. To link the Sage user to the Windows user, select Browse and choose the correct account, select OK and Save Changes when ready.

Updating Sage

The first step to upgrading Sage 300 CRE to a newer version is to reach out to us, and ask us to snapshot the server. This way if at any point during or after the upgrade process there is a failure, we can roll back to the pre-upgrade image.

Once we confirm we've snapshotted the server, just simply login to the customers server using administrative access (https://manage.swizznet.com and use the gear icon to connect) and run the software update.

Backups

We back up the full machine nightly. We keep these backups for 30 days. So, if you keep the default maintenance plan, you will effectively have 44 days of nightly backups to revert to. If you keep only a week, you will have 37 days.

View a webinar recording of these items:

 

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