Is Intuit QuickBooks 2012 Phoning Home?

We are in the process of setting up the Intuit QuickBooks 2012 database manager on a relatively new SBS 2011 setup.

This is our first time seeing this software so we were a little surprised by the following during the QB 2012 setup routine:

The installer looks like the following when ready to install:

And finally:

The database management install only took a few minutes for this particular setup.

The next step in this process was to update the firewall rules on the SBS 2011 (running virtualized) to allow the database manager and its components to function. Once the firewall rules were updated we recycled both QB services.

For the moment we will be leaving the “…DB20” service alone.

To test the setup we went to install QB 2012 on the RDS server on this particular network. Again we received the prompt:

We choose the option to only install the QB client:

Now, we go and install the Intuit QB Connection Diagnostic Tool:

Once completed we run the tool. When the tool begins its start-up process we see the following warning several times:

We then run the Test Connectivity tool:

When we were done we clicked on the Close button and received several more prompts for the workplace URL.

We have yet to dig into Intuit’s Privacy Policy and documentation to figure out just what information is being transmitted back home. Neither the QB install routine nor the QB Connection Diagnostic Tool have any links anywhere that have any relevant information either.

The Help link was not very helpful either.

For now we have a look around to see if we can find any further information.

For now, the following may give us a clue as to what is going on as it was a Snip taken earlier this year:

With the new URL it looks as though Intuit has brought the analytics in-house.

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.