In this first of my series of  posts on the top 5 mistakes that are often made when implementing SAP Business One that lead to performance issues I would like to address the issue of client deployment in a WAN based environment.

And of course in other posts I will also cover some key points to look out for when using a standard LAN environment.

Now some of these points will be familiar to many of you who are familiar with SAP Business One and so you may find these to be a little bit of a bore so I’ll try to wrap up some less boring info as well in the posts that you may not be aware of or that may assist you in deploying in a WAN environment.

So the first thing to be aware of tis the fact that SAP Business One is actually a thick client when deployed in its standard state which is in a 2 tier client server environment with the data persisted in a Microsoft SQL Server database and the business logic and presentation layer wrapped up in the client that is deployed on the workstation.

So what does this mean?

Well fundamentally it means that the majority of data to be accessed and used by the client needs to brought to the workstation over the network connection between workstation and server so you need to have a network connection of at least 10 Mbps for the solution to run effectively….add reporting to the standard transaction processing being done by the app and you can end up with significant amounts of data being transferred over the wire.

So the big mistake the folks sometimes make is deploying the client over a WAN – typically I see this with people saying “but we have a VPN and we have leased line or 2 to 4 Mbps available data”.

But the bottom line is this – you need to have a connection between the client and the server of at least a dedicated 10 Mbps Full Duplex or of course 100 Mbps is even better.

So the answer to running SAP Business One in a WAN environment is to deploy it by using Windows Server 2008 and Remote Desktop Services which then takes care of any issues relating to excessive data transfer over the WAN.

The you can simply deploy the RDP client on the remote system (which if its Windows, its already built in or on a Mac I like to use a product called CORD (https://cord.sourceforge.net/).

This of course then gives you the added advantage of simplifying the process of maintaining the client and quickly and easily scaling vertically and horizontally up to meet additional needs as you add clients. Add to that the benefits of virtualization and of course the upcoming 64 bit SAP Business One client in Version 9 and you have a great solution for WAN based deployments.

If you would like to see exactly how to deploy SAP Business One in this kind of environment please visit my YouTube Channel and check out the playlist entitled “Building Your Own Private Cloud Demo System” as it covers all the required steps for installing B1 on a Terminal Server / Remote Desktop Services environment – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL23E3A5587A630508&feature=plpp

Of course now that SAP Business One OnDemand is available you can run the entire solution via the cloud and gain all the benefits of remote access anywhere anytime plus you don’t have to worry about purchasing and managing those pesky servers!

Of course you can also deploy via Citrix XenApp as well and take advantage of the ICA protocol and the additional management tools that Citrix provide but I’ll cover that in a future post.

New NetWeaver Information at SAP.com

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