OK, so I've been assigned the task of getting the shitty shitty Peachtree Accounting 2007 software working on our campus computers. I'm getting nowhere with it.
Let me explain the problem:
Peachtree 2007 is supposed to be used for a class on campus starting, oh, next week or so. The 2007 academic software is supposed to work in a network environment without any issues, but we've run into a major issue with it pretty much instantly.
As I said, Peachtree is an accounting program. think Quickbooks for mouthbreathers, and you've got Peachtree. Anyhow, when you open it for the first time, it wants you to create your company so you can actually do your accounting stuff. All would be well and good there, except the software tries to do some sort of encryption with the company files that fails.
Why does the encryption fail? It fails because all of the student accounts on our domain use
mandatory user profiles. As I understand it the failure occurs because the profile is temporary and various Cryptography things are not supported with temporary (i.e. mandatory) user profiles.
Anyhow, this isn't a Peachtree support forum, and I know exactly WHY the error is occuring (Shitty Peachtree is shitty, and lies about working.). The problem is, I have to come up with a work-around for this very quickly.
I had an idea which partially works, but I can't fully implement it:
We created a new user on the domain called 'Peachtree', and we don't have it using a mandatory profile. We then open Peachtree as the 'Peachtree' user (via either the runas command, or via C# wizardry), and the program is able to function without issues. As I said, this is only a partial fix, though.
- The network printers across campus are mapped at logon, and thus are not mapped for the 'Peachtree' user that's using Peachtree.
- The real student who's sitting at the PC is not be able to see his/her network Home drive since the 'Peachtree' user is using Peachtree.
I tried amending our script/code to map both the printers and the network home drive either before or after the 'Peachtree' user opens Peachtree, but it doesn't work. My guess is that it doesn't work because each operation (i.e. mapping the drive, mapping the printer, opening the program) creates a separate, fully encapsulated, instance of the 'Peachtree' user, and none of the instances can see each other. Thus, mapping the printers and drives does nothing to the instance of 'Peachtree' that's using the software.
So, I'm hoping someone might have some idea that would work. I don't have the authorization to make wholesale changes to our network, so I can't take off the mandatory profile. My boss is also trying to keep in line with some government regulations, so he doesn't want everyone logging in as a generic local/network user account. This leaves me with no idea of where to go from here, and the Peachtree people aren't helping us at all since we're using the Academic software.
I have a feeling there's really nothing feasible that I can do, but I'm hoping one of you fellas/ladies that's clearly smarter than me might have a doable suggestion.
The closest I've come to anything is telling my boss they have to log in as a generic user, and then I'll just have them type their Windows username/password into a fake Peachtree login box that will then map printers and network drive and open the software.
This whole thing is a big fucking mess.
