Has anyone out there used Navision over a WAN rather than something like citrix? I don’t expect full speed of course, but is it even feasable? We have a T-1 and the clients would be using cable or DSL.
This is feasible but it will work slowly. I run Navision trough modem line long time ago. I took about 1 min just to open main menu. But it will work. Also I tried to run thought Cable Modem (1Mb). It was very good for data entry but much slower for reports. Also every time your DSL line loose connection user will receive error message and have to restart Navision. In some cases it is even worse problem. If you want try you should have more Object Cache on the client. In this case system will not read objects from database second time.
I connect to our system from home via Citrix using ADSL. Posting documents and running reports is almost as good as being connected to the DB locally.
if you have a W2K server, you can also use an RDP session. Performance is really acceptable. You can also download a product like VNC (free) and control a remote PC. I use it to manage the station on our WAN, even Station connected via Modem. Regards.
Thanks…for your input. I have used products like PCAnywhere or GoToMyPC which work very well and are pretty secure. I haven’t heard of VNC so I’m not sure about security there until I do some research. We are currently using both PCAnywhere and GoToMyPC. The problem with the above senarios is that they require some sort of dedicated PC on the office end. In a case where our employee has a laptop, for example, there is no PC in the office to connect to. Even if I dedicated one for that purpose, I know from experience the next set of complaints will be that someone else is using it when they want to. Since we are having some decent activity on this topic, anyone out there know of some good WAN software that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to purchase/install? Thanks.
Citrix and terminal server handles multiple sessions on the same machine transparently as opposed to PCAnywhere, VNC e.t.c Security in VNC sucks i.e. is a simple password sent over the line in plain text. You will need to secure the line by other means using VNC e.g. VPN. If you have a W2K server you allreade have terminal services. All you have to do is enable it and purchase some clients, which by the way are a whole lot cheaper than Citrix clients. You still have a line security issue. W2K has a built in VPN server which is quite easy to use.
Thanks Allan. Do you think the standard VPN software that comes with Win2k is secure? I have heard both yes and no, depending on what someone is trying to sell me… Any input would be great.
Sorry to say i am not a security expert, but i think it is safe enough for many purposes. But of course you can find alternate products with a lot more flexibility and security. And anyway is any VPN secure enough if the user by mistake downloads some malicious backdoor program from the internet which can intercept passwords etc.
Scott, Just an FYI here, but we utilize the standard Terminal Services from W2K for our external consultants to enter into the time journal. It works great for us and we’ve got probably 20 or so remote users banging away on a daily basis through this. Hope this helps and please feel free to call for more info and I can get you in touch with some of our networking people for more detailed recommendations on this. Regards, Bill Moffett
Just one word on VNC and security. We use TightVNC (www.tightvnc.com) which is a more secure and faster solution. In TightVNC, password is crypted during login. This version is really secure. (Of course, for your problem, i should use an RDP session to execute Navision Client). Regards.
There is a version of VNC which uses NT authentication for logging on to the program