Sage 100

Data Replication. My customer's main server with Sage 100 Advanced 4.3 (soon to be 2014) is in Pennsylvania. The financial people are at the plant in Ohio. When opening Excel or Access it takes FOREVER to make the ODBC connection and they do this several times throughout the day. Very cumbersome, if not intolerable. The thought was to get DSD's SQL mirroring program and replicate the data locally but they cannot afford it. Does anyone have a poor man's way of getting the data local to speed up the ODBC connection?

I had a client with 2 installations of Sage (needed POS at one site) and their IT staff setup a routine to copy the company data from site A to site B each night so we could have consildated financials in site B. Shouldn't be too difficult but you would need a local installation - for backup and redundancy purposes (official reason).

RDP or am I missing something?

Since they are in separate locations and presumably not using RDP you could turn on and configure the CS ODBC driver on the server then in the ODBC connection string add the 2 properties for CS ODBC which might be RemotePvkioHost = <server name or IP> and RemotePvkioPort = 202222 (not in front of computer so not sure). Having said that I've resolved this problem more often by doing what @EricAnderson said.

RDP, RDP, RDP - Excel itself is slooooooow

Eric's solution will work but is potentially a violation of Sage's license agreement by installing two copies of Sage 100 on multiple servers. I agree with the RDP recommendation. You will need a single copy of the open license version of Office in order to run it in a terminal server environment. However, once you have the open license copy, you can use your Office 365 licenses on the terminal server so additional licenses are not required if you are using office 365. Running Excel and Access on the RDP will greatly speed the process with limited incremental cost.

@DanBurleson 's Shadow Access. Does the same thing as SQL Mirror but for much lower cost (does have a 2 GB limit on Access db size though) IT could setup a script to update the Access tables, zip and transfer to Ohio each night.

Put excel on terminal server, but use sugarsync to keep documents synced with their local copy of the data