Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 and Sage Accounts/Sage Line 50 2015 data service (SBS 2011)

Sage have released their yearly update, however this time around it seems that they've decided to make it more difficult to have your Sage data installed on a server instead of a local PC.

If you have Sage on a network share but no app installed on the server and you update it to 2015, then you may (will!) receive a warning message when you try to connect  that the "Sage Data Service" is not running on the target server.

Usually I don't have the Sage software installed on server - its just another access point that needs maintaining. Instead, the data just resides on a share.

So the fix is to install Sage on the server - but alas, Sage have decided that SBS 2011 is not worthy! If you try and install it from the auto-run app it says that you don't have a compatible system.. even though we all know its 2008 R2 in disguise.

The solution? For me it was a simple task of navigating to the install folder on the sage CD and then running "clientserversetup.exe" instead of trying to install it from the auto-run application.

One thing that may also help is SP1 - but then if you're running SBS 2011 and you don't have SP1 you need a bit of a slap anyway :)

Hope it helps someone.

Edit: It seems that if you can install Sage from the auto-run it actually gives you the option of just installing the "Data Service" instead of the whole application so it may be worth looking into that. But for my part, the above solution fixed it quickly for me.

Edit 2: I confirmed today that SP1 has nothing to do with this - its all down to running the executable instead of installing from the autorun