Request: Restore unattended update capability from AccountRight Server Edition

We are trying to replicate functionality that was previously available with the AccountRight Server Edition and that is particularly important in hosted/RDS environments.

Our client operates AccountRight within an RDS farm in a hosted environment. Rather than maintaining a separate AccountRight installation within each user's %AppData% profile, we have relocated the AccountRight application folder to a shared location on a file server. Multiple users execute the same installation from this shared location.

This works perfectly well for normal operation.

The problem occurs with automatic updates.

The AccountRight update process needs to create and modify files within the application directory. Because the shared application directory deliberately does not grant normal users Modify/Write permissions, an automatic update initiated by a standard user cannot complete.

Our current workaround is to have an administrator with sufficient permissions launch AccountRight, allow approximately 60 seconds for the update process to detect, download and install any available update, and then close the application so that the update/restart process can complete.

This is obviously not suitable as a proper unattended administration process.

Requested functionality

We would like MYOB to restore the unattended update capability that was previously available with AccountRight Server Edition.

Specifically, we would like a documented command-line operation that:

• can be executed without displaying the AccountRight GUI;
• checks for an available AccountRight update;
• downloads and installs the update using the same update mechanism currently used by AccountRight;
• can be executed under a scheduled task, service account, SYSTEM account, or other administrative context;
• returns an appropriate exit code indicating success, failure, or that no update was required; and
• does not require AccountRight to be interactively opened and subsequently closed to initiate the update.

Ideally, this would simply expose the existing update functionality already present in the current AccountRight PC Edition through a supported command-line interface.

This would allow organisations operating AccountRight in RDS, terminal-server, hosted, or other centrally managed environments to perform updates in a controlled and unattended manner without granting ordinary users write access to the application installation directory.

We are not requesting a different update mechanism — only a supported, unattended way of invoking the same update process that AccountRight already performs when the application is launched interactively.

This functionality was available in the former Server Edition and would be extremely valuable to have restored for the current PC Edition.