Return Quickbooks for Refund
I was going to title this post "Microsoft Representative Says to Return Quickbooks for Refund". Then I thought to myself:
"Oh, Jesper's going to be so mad with me for that tagline."
Sorry, Jesper.
I'd probably also upset Steve Riley, who works a lot with Jesper, and gets irritated when Microsoft reps are badly misquoted, or when writers conflate an otherwise succinct message in order to demonise Microsoft.
Jesper didn't actually say to return Quickbooks for a refund, and he wasn't specifically, directly, referring to Quickbooks when he said:
"Two related issues usually come up at about this point in the conversation. The first one is that some application requires at least Power User privilege. If that application is not an inherently administrative one it is broken. Period. Return it for a refund or a fixed version."
But, as you can see from http://www.threatcode.com, despite years of being prodded by Security MVPs and CPAs alike that Quickbooks shouldn't be an admin-only product (what system administration task does it do? NONE!), Quickbooks remains solidly in the "Administrator or Power User" camp. At one point, a tech support rep at the company "responsible" even claimed that this was a good thing, because it meant that only trusted people were doing your accounts.
As a developer myself, it looks strikingly similar to "we didn't want to have to do the hard work of figuring out how to share files across users without writing to files in the Program Files directory tree".
Me, I trust my accountant to do my accounts; but I don't trust my network admin to do my accounts, nor do I trust my accountant to administer my network.
So, my network admin has administrator privileges, and my accountant has the key to my filing cabinet. I'll be upset if I find that they're sharing them.