I've upgraded a customer's server from Win2003 to SBS2003 as they wanted use of Exchange and Sharepoint. Their AD was also a mess, so as it's a small company decided to do a clean install.
They are currently using ACT 2007, although looking to move to a different solution in the near future. In the meantime, I need to get ACT working again on their network after the upgrade.
I'm not very familiar with ACT and to further complicate things, this server was originally setup by another company. From initial glance it seemed pretty straightforward, but now I'm discovering ACT data all over the place and am trying to determine which is the current data set.
My understanding was the ACT stored its data in SQL Server Express. However, if I go to open a database in a newly installed copy of ACT on the server, it's asking for a PAD file. I've found a PAD file that was last modified on the day that we disconnected their server from the network, so tried to open this using the account details they had provided.
It opened fine and appears to have all recent data showing. So where does SQL Server come into it?
Also, all user My Documents folders are redirected to the server - and I can see that some of the users have an ACT folder in their My Docs, which also has data in the Database folder.
All users are sharing the same data that resides on the server. As they are not using the Premium version of ACT, I assumed that they were doing simple sharing as opposed to synchronization. But having done some further research it seems that Application Synchronization is available in the the standard version - although I'm not clear on what the different between Synchronization and Application Synchronization is.
So, this is what I need to know:
- In a network environment where all data is shared from one machine, where is the ACT data stored?
- How do I determine if they are sharing or syncing data ?
