We may have stumbled upon a solution to a really obscure Peachtree problem that has plagued more than one of our clients. Thanks – and kudos – to Anthony Licate of Spidernet Technical Consulting for working through this one and coming up with a definitive solution.

Terminal Services has become a very popular vehicle for configuring remote computing environments, and most of the software applications we support at TriStar explicitly support Terminal Services. Peachtree is no exception to this. However, there are some very subtle but significant configuration settings which can seriously impact Peachtree’s performance in the terminal services environment. Emailing documents (via the Peachtree PDF Writer) is one of those areas.

Our client was consistently unable to email invoices through Peachtree when operating on the Terminal Server. The client was also experiencing periodic difficulties printing to her local printer when attempting to print to it through Terminal Services. Needless to say, this can get to be very annoying very quickly, and erode one’s confidence in the technology which allegedly facilitates this kind of remote access.

After much troubleshooting, we discovered that a somewhat obscure “group policy” setting in Windows Small Business Server 2008 was automatically “redirecting” any document sent to the My Documents folder on the Terminal Server over to the file server, which then ran afoul of the registry settings, or permissions, for Peachtree when attempting to email (or in some cases print) a Peachtree document.

Having diagnosed it, the fix was simple: turn off the group policy setting for this within Small Business Server. Voila! All Peachtree documents can now be emailed, and the sporadic printing issues have all disappeared.

If you are running on Small Business Server 2008 (or any other version of Server 2008 for that matter) check your “Group Policy” settings to make sure that you are not also an unwitting victim of “My Documents Redirection.”

Emailing invoices out of Peachtree is really very easy and convenient – but only if all of the technology is harnessed to work together.

Please let us know if you have also experienced emailing and printing issues in Terminal Server. We may be able to help you fix it.