Introduction

We are aware that many users who typically work in the office will need to work from home in the immediate future. To ensure that you can still use Draycir's products, you will need a mechanism to connect to your office network, typically a VPN. Your IT provider should provision this for you.

Connecting to the server

Spindle Professional and Spindle Document Distribution, and Credit Hound all use standard Windows file sharing (SMB) to access the centralised database. 

Spindle Document Capture, Spindle Document Management and Credit Hound version 6 also make a connection using TCP/IP to the server.

The preparations you will need to make will depend on how you interact with the software currently.

- I have a laptop, with the Accounting package installed locally. The accounting package data is also held on this laptop.

You do not need to do anything different to use Spindle Document Distribution or Credit Hound.

- I have a laptop, the accounting package is installed locally but its data is held on a SQL server. I already have a VPN connection to the office that allows me to connect to the SQL database.

You do not need to do anything different. The VPN is allowing the traffic to the server as is you were in the office network

- I have a laptop, the accounting package is installed on a server that I connect to using MS Remote Desktop Connection or Citrix Published apps.

Ensure that your VPN allows you to connect to the remote desktop, the software will function as usual.

- I use a desktop PC but am being lent a laptop while working from home

a) If you normally access Draycir's products via a remote desktop environment or a Citrix environment than you will need a VPN client installed to the laptop to allow you to access the remote desktop/Citrix as if you were in the office.

b) If you have Draycir products installed on your desktop PC, you will need to have the same version of the software installed onto the laptop. A VPN will be required so that you can access the shared database(s).

Licensing Issues arising from needing additional installations

Installing additional copies of Draycir products may cause you to exceed the number of users allowed by the licence. Normally we would advise uninstalling the software, however, to avoid the need for excessive unistalls and reinstalls, you can request a temporary increased user count on the licence.

Should this be the case please contact licences@draycir.com and we can issue a temporary licence that allows for the additional users.

Troubleshooting

If you experience any issues connecting to any shared resources such as Spindle Document distribution's Database, the Credit Hound Shared Folder or to Spindle Document Management's server component, then please ensure that you are using the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the machine for any servers - See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_qualified_domain_name.

To ensure that your VPN connection is correctly appending the domain to the server name:

• Open Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center
  
• Click Change Adapter Settings - You will need to provide administrator credentials if you are not an administrator
• Right-Click your VPN connection and choose Properties
• Switch to the Networking tab
• Select Internet Protocol Version 4 and click Properties
• In the properties window, click Advanced...
• In the DNS tab, ensure that the options to append the domain name are configured:

For any other troubleshooting, please contact Draycir Support on support@draycir.com