QuickBooks is a powerful, easy-to-use financial management system. Growing businesses find QuickBooks Solutions advantageous because their simplicity and scalability (ability to support up to 30 simultaneous users and handle large amounts of data and transactions).

However a common problem with QuickBooks is remote access. Many small businesses now need more flexibility for their collaborators to use QuickBooks from anywhere.

More and more, users want to access QuickBooks remotely, for a variety of reasons. Key people travel frequently, several staff members are in other locations, or an accountant or bookkeeper need access to QuickBooks. You can certainly send backups to each other, although some files are getting too large for that - even with the Portable Company option. Some accountants will use the Accountant's copy, but then both the accountant and users have restrictions. So, the idea that people can be in different locations and access the same data file is becoming more popular.

So browsing on the Inernet, we can find a lot of frustrated users trying to find their way around this:

• How can two people share a QuickBooks file over the internet?
• How do we share Quickbooks over The Internet?
• How safe is QuickBooks remote access ?

There are multiple ways of accessing QuickBooks remotely and we will be discussing them in detail.

Challenge

QuickBooks is a file based solution like MS Access, and does not have any Client/Server capability, this explains why its Remote Access features are limited.

It has been designed to be used on a Local Area Network, but today QuickBooks files are getting bigger and even LAN usage can be slow.

There is generaly no single answer to extending QuickBooks beyond the LAN, so we will examine the different possibilities and rank them accordingly.

We will then see how Vedivi Business can help in providing an efficient way of extending QuickBooks.

In this blog, we will discuss how to extend Remote Assistance over the Internet and through firewalls and routers to assist people anywhere from anywhere.

There are various ways to connect Remote Assistance over the Internet: from manually creating and editing invitation files, opening ports and setting port translations to using Easy Connect, available in Windows 7 only. And finally we will see an alternative way to connect Remote Assistance over the Internet without all the previous limitations.

I did work recently on configuring Firewalls programmatically within an application, so I thought I should share my experience here.

Challenge

Most computers run a Personal Firewall these days (Windows Firewall, PC-Cillin, Norton, AVG...). So in many cases, software developers will have to deal with getting their application configured in their customer's firewall.

You could either choose to tell your users how they should configure their firewall (in a help document) or do it automatically (during the install process).

Some application only require a static configuration, i.e a configuration that will never change. For instance "myservice.exe" should be added to the list of "exceptions" or trusted applications. This can be performed during the installation process and is normally supported by most installers (InstallShield)

But in other cases, the configuration depends on the user configuration and needs to be done after the install. Then you will need to deal with it within your application. So let's see how to do it in C++

There is a lot out there about enabling Remote Desktop remotely with different methods (registry or script), but not much about enabling Remote Desktop within your application (programmatically), especially for C++ developers . All we want to achieve here is Enable/Disable Remote Desktop as we would do in the System Properties.

This would be useful for admin softwares or installers that need to enable/disable Terminal Services.