Would blocking the program internet access work?
Would blocking the program internet access work?
I have been using my program (Sage 50 Instant Accounting) for three years. The only three online activities for which I have ever used it were:
VAT submissions (no longer valid, as not MTD-compliant);
Emailing invoices (only for the first week or so, until I realised that my non-standard font was being lost in transmission. I have since saved all invoices as PDFs and manually attached them to messages outside of Sage);
Checking for program updates (obviously no longer an issue).
So, if the program could be encouraged to continue to function offline, that would be fine for me.
Does anybody know definitively how frequently the program checks for internet access? Are there any registry settings that could be adjusted to stop this behaviour at source? If I use firewall settings to deny it outbound and inbound access, does anybody have any idea as to how long before such a holiday period might expire?
I'm hoping that there are people out there who have been using the program on standalone systems isolated from either internet or intranets - did you have to jump through any hoops in order to have it run, long-term?
I appreciate that tinkering with registry settings will contravene EULA terms, but I cannot imagine that anybody reading this will have difficulty in understanding that I am prepared to live with the shame of doing so. Sage themselves clearly feel no such obligation, living by their own changeable rules as they do.
I'd appreciate any advice, or just thoughts. Thanks.
UPDATE - in the two days that I have so far been waiting for the above post to be passed by the moderators, I have blocked every Sage-related executable from accessing the internet, both inbound and outbound. The program still runs; I can load my data file across my intranet; calculate VAT; print invoices as PDF; backup the program, to a remote folder. Seemingly, all the things I need it to do. Time will tell whether this is a long-term solution, but switching accounts packages is not a trivial matter for me so I shall wait and see how this behaves after Sage Rip-off Day. I shall be adding .PIFs and other files with dodgy potential to the firewall rules as well.