Thursday 2 December 2010

CaseWare Working Papers 2010 – Network File Locations Errors

Just lately we have been seeing a lot of problems with CaseWare Working Papers 2010 and the files associated with the program being located on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (including SBS) file shares.

CaseWare has this to say:

image

CaseWare International highly recommends disabling SMB2.

Specifically, the problems have reared their head with the Working Papers R2 and R3 updates applied.

This situation really gives us cause for pause.

Why, you might ask?

Because CaseWare’s recommendation to disable SMB2 (the network sharing protocol that gives us 100MB+/Second file copies on the network) takes us a huge step backwards in network performance.

Now, for a small accounting firm this may not be a big deal . . . depending on how many QuickBooks and Simply clients they are bookkeeping for. Or, how many large files are moving around on the network.

As soon as we disable SMB2 we are at a disadvantage for any large data sets moving around on the network. So, for our larger accounting firm clients with quite a number of QuickBooks files open simultaneously plus their regular network traffic we may start to hear complaints about poor network performance.

In our opinion, the suggestion to disable SMB2 comes at too high a cost for most accounting firms.

With the just released R7 for CaseWare Working Papers 2010 we are hoping that we will see things settle down to the same level RTM had (virtually no issues).

If not, we may be looking at setting up a small NAS appliance with a folder share _just for CaseWare files_ so as to not impact the overall performance of the network.

BTW, our last attempt to contact CaseWare support took 5 days before their initial response which was to e-mail another department and then _another_ 3 days before the answer finally came through. Eight days to straighten out an activation issue with CaseWare Working Papers 2010 . . . ouch.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

Gerry A said...

Sounds very similar to this thread from Symantec-

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/cannot-copy-files-using-smb-20-protocol-sep-11-ru6-and-ru6a

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Gerry,

Awesome link! Thanks for that.

This kind of reminds me of the TDI.SYS problem that some A/V vendor's products got hooked on prior to Windows Server 2008's service pack 2.

We think that we are seeing legacy components failing to work with the new structures to be found in SMBv2 ... just like TDI.SYS.

Those that put Microsoft on the hook may need to take a step back as the software vendors may be the ones on the hook for this.

We have many products running on SMBv2 enabled networks without a hiccup.

IMNSHO, those that are having issues are the exception to the norm, not the norm.

Thanks again for bringing that to our attention.

Philip