A Code Signing Certificate is a digital certificate that gives customers confidence that software has been provided by its official publisher.

A binary file is a file whose content must be interpreted by a program or a hardware processor that understands in advance exactly how it is formatted. That is, the file is not in any externally identifiable format so that any program that wanted to, could look for certain data at a certain place within the file.  

As a certificate authority (CA) and trusted third party, DigiCert provides the public key infrastructure (PKI) and validation required for issuing digital certificates or TLS/SSL certificates. These certificates are used to verify and authenticate the identities of organizations and domains and to protect the privacy and data integrity of users’ digital interactions with web browsers, email clients, documents, software programs, apps, networks and connected IoT devices.

Elevated privileges are when a user is granted the ability to do more than a standard user.

A standard user is someone that has “zero administrative” privileges in any capacity.

Examples of elevated privileges would include:

Administering the domain ‘Run as Administrator’ setting on Sage 200 Evolution desktop icon Properties

What about your business requirements for running software with elevated privileges?

This mandatory upgrade becomes especially relevant for software that is run with elevated privileges.

Also note by default Offline Branch Accounting Sync Monitors run with Elevated Privileges which makes it essential to upgrade your Sync Monitors as well.

At Sage, we take security very seriously. We want to make sure our customers are always protected.

Installing these updates is essential for keeping Sage products secure and compliant with the latest statutory requirements.

Where possible, we try to align security updates with standard product releases. Most payroll products have releases going out now, and we did not want to run this during year-end in February/March 2022.

DigiCert is used to validate the Digital Certifications of all Sage products, including Sage 200 Evolution. Sage therefore instructs DigiCert to disable our current Sage product certificates as they are now replaced by the updated certificates that comes with the new product updates.

Every customer using any of the products mentioned above will receive an email to inform them that the update is coming and a note once the software is available. We will also send out a reminder email seven days after the software was released. 

First note that applying the mandatory update will replace the existing certificate and issue a new certificate.

The user may expect the following error message after 12 November 2021 when running Evolution if you have not upgraded by then: "An administrator has blocked you from running this app. For more information, please contact administrator”

In addition, you may also not be able to install / re-install / un-install Evolution using your current version’s install directory.

Always remember that software updates are designed to provide the best user experience and our customers with the latest security updates. That means upgrading your Sage 200 Evolution package comes with obvious advances such as new features and old software bugs being fixed.

We’ve uploaded a detailed new Knowledgebase Article (KBA) on the Sage Knowledgebase.

Please refer to the second last page of this presentation where we included various document download links, including that of the KBA

Yes, you’ll still have to implement the mandatory upgrade.

Although we are aware of known issues when running Evolution with Elevated Privileges and an expired digital certificate, there can still be any number of still unknown issues when not running with Elevated Privileges.

Please also note that Sage is following software developer industry standards. This means we always recommend our customers to install and use software with unexpired digital certificates to ensure full confidence in running your Sage software.

https://www.sagecity.com/za/sage-evolution-south-africa/f/sage-evolution-south-africa-announcements-news-and-alerts/175884/mandatory-sage-200-evolution-updates-required

https://www.sagecity.com/za/sage-evolution-south-africa/b/sage-200-evolution-support-insights/posts/sage-evolution-sdk-certificate-expiration