Does anyone have any experiences to share? I'm looking for the most robust solution money can buy for sharing the data file over the internet with our offices in South Africa and the UK. I'm looking for hardware and connection type advice.

Three words: Don't do it.

MYOB passes so much information through the network that the VPN connection is unusable. Apple makes an optimizer available (for free) for developers called Shark that manages and optimizes network usage by applications. Shark allows for apps to be developed that use the network as efficiently as possible. In the recent discussion regarding the conversion of QB (Still single-user only), they commented how Shark and the use of open source databases were extremely helpful at making the application more efficient and fast.

MYOB does not have a true client/server solution, it can only be run peer-to-peer through an application called FileConnect.

If you search these topics, you will find that the highest read and most commented posts are regarding network speed. It limits all of us.

Daniel Lomax has commented very often about a potential solution using an older version of Windows Server, remote clients and a windows version of MYOB to effectively run the application remotely. Apparently, the speed is quite adequate.

VPN here as single user results in card files taking 45-50 minutes to load. We have 5 users, 3,500 cards and our datafile is 145MB in size (for comparison). Network speeds on either side of the VPN are 1.5MB/4.5MB Down and 768Kb/256Kb Up. We're utilizing the VPN in Panther Server (10.3.9) with Tiger (10.4.8) clients.

If your time zones allow, you could forward the datafile to the different networks for the days work. Additionally, if one zone needs to do analysis only, you could work on a copy of the datafile which was updated daily.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Spence,

quote:

Originally posted by Edward Taylor:
Does anyone have any experiences to share? I'm looking for the most robust solution money can buy for sharing the data file over the internet with our offices in South Africa and the UK. I'm looking for hardware and connection type advice.

Spence has replied assuming that Mr. Taylor is interested in Mac MYOB. Perhaps he knows something I don't know. To my knowledge there is no pure Mac solution to this problem.

However, there is a solution for Premier, the Windows version of MYOB. It is quite simple, really. Spence mentions "an older version of Windows Server." The solution works with any version of Windows Server, I only mention the older one (Windows 2000 Server) because it is cheaper and does the job.

The solution involves understanding that the peer-to-peer configuration of MYOB also implies that MYOB will function properly where all users (the "peers") are running sessions on a server, instead of on their own computer. If the company file lives on that computer, presto! No need to transfer the huge company file data across the network....

So what you do is to install MYOB on a server, running a server edition of Windows. The company file also lives on this same server. The server need not be, for this application, terribly fast, but, hey, faster is better. If you have a lot of users you will probably notice and appreciate the speed.

Running Windows 2000 on an Athlon 1600 with 512MB of RAM, in other words, on a dinosaur by today's standards, with three simultaneous users, we see no necessity for improvement in speed. But it would probably feel a little better to use a faster computer.

The users run Remote Desktop on their own computers. Those computers can be Macs or PCs or any system that has a Remote Desktop application available. Which is just about every computer. The local computer doesn't matter, really, since it is only functioning as a terminal, handling keyboard, mouse, and display, for the most part. These clients can access the server over the local network, or over the internet using VPN. Indeed, that is what I do routinely, from home. Since I have a DSL line at home, I see no difference in latency between sitting at home and sitting at the console of the server. However, when I was accessing it from home using dialup internet, display was a bit slow. But quite usable. This is impossible with standard MYOB peer-to-peer, the bandwidth of even a DSL line is too low for good performance and, of course, we have not only the DSL line from, say, home, but also the internet connection of the place where the server lives.

With VPN and Remote Desktop, the network connection only needs to handle the very small amount of data involved in display and control.

It is quite a bit more reliable, as well, than standard peer-to-peer. Our peer-to-peer installation used to crash several times a day, it was quite a nuisance. We didn't change anything except we moved the company file to the server and started using Remote Desktop. We have been seeing some abnormal program shutdowns lately, but they remain rare, perhaps one every few weeks. I'm not at all sure what is going on.... We have gone long periods of time, running on the server, with no crashes at all.

There are some details about this on the user wiki at http://myob-users.org. Anyone with more information is invited to add it.

(Technically, running MYOB the way I have described is still peer-to-peer. What has changed is that now all peers are local to the company file... Each one has loaded its own copy of MYOB in its own memory. They all access the same folder of forms. One can imagine quite a few ways this could go wrong, but apparently, MYOB behaves quite nicely. The only thing I notice is that the default user will often be someone else.... that's because, I'm sure, there is a config file that is written with the identity of the last person to log on, or something like that. Since it is written in the MYOB program space, which is only one space for all users, it affects all users. There may be some other configuration details that could similarly "conflict." But obviously they are not blatant and probably they aren't serious, if there are any others at all.

The suggestion of passing the company file back and forth .... well, apparently some people are so allergic to Windows that they will go to enormous lengths to avoid it. I suppose that it could be said for this plan that backup would be automatic. However, being unable to work on MYOB while a company file greater than 100 MB was being passed across the network, that could be quite a problem. And, of course, this would not allow people to work from home at the same time as others are working from the office....

Get thee to the Windows version, if you don't already have it, and set up a server with Windows Server. It is probably your only reasonable option, unless you leave MYOB for something else.

We have had users logging in on their laptops (via wireless) in a hotel room in China to their businesses here in Australia using a vpn (OpenVPN) as MYOB users. The speed is quite reasonable considering. We use NX because it it far more efficient then rdp. The cost of setting up this system is also far cheaper than using a Microsoft server / Terminal server licences.
more info at www.bizux.com.au

Has anyone used MYOB Network Edition on a Mac OSX Server? I read a post on a different site where the user had serious issues. We tried using MYOB with one off site employee accessing the program over a VPN but it was miserably slow so now we are going to host it on a server and access the program remotely.

We have 1 mac in one location and 2 pc's in another. We would like to work on the same file so as to streamline sales and invoicing, as well as other functions.

Has anyone had experience using dropbox (dropbox.com)?

In theory it seems like it should work since the .myo file works cross platform and the files accessible in dropbox can be in shared folders on the individual computers.

We would also like to consolidate contact management, so that the pc people and mac people can enter contacts in that can be 'transferred' with myob as the middle point from computer to computer.

Any thoughts?