Sharing sidekick 1

[creamer]

Dear All

I want to be able to share the same datafiles over different PC's. We are currently running Sidekick 98 on just the one PC but need different users in the same office to be able to view & edit the same customer records (at the same time is not important) on other PC's. Is this possible? Thanks

 

[james33]

Dear creamer,

Sidekick was never intended to be used in this way and Starfish warned that it is not possible to share the same data files over a network without corrupting then.
Think long and hard about the following before you even attempt it.

The only way that I could think of to do that would be to have a read only version of a cardfile on a server,
1. This could be copied to each workstation at the beginning of the day.
2. There would be a blank copy (not read only) having identical fields on each workstation,
3. Any alterations to the data would be performed by copying the relevant card over to the blank copy and then editing it locally.
4. At the end of the day ALL workstation copies of Sidekick would be closed down and then each edited cardfile would be MERGED over the network with the server copy (made read and write for this procedure).
5. The server copy would then be made read only again and copied back to each workstation overwriting the previous day's.
6. Likewise a BLANK cardfile would again be copied over to ALL the workstations overwriting the previous day's blank cardfile.

The possible drawbacks to this are:
1. If the index fields of a card are altered in any way, it will create a duplicate as the card will NOT overwrite the original.
2. If 2 or more workstations edit the same card between the merging periods then the last cardfile to be merged will overwrite all the previous edits/versions.
3. If 2 or more cards are identical in their indexed fields then one card can overwrite more than one and the result is that some (more than 2) cards may disappear.

There may be other things to consider, nonetheless I have kept 2 geographically separate workplaces in synch this way, but I religiously made backups before merging and checked out the number of cards which resulted from the merge it could be stressful and each user needs to be aware of the consequences of their actions.
Sidekick97/Internet Sidekick has a facility that allows you to SYNCHRONISE 2 cardfiles over a network and to choose which alteration to accept, but this depended on a tag in the last field that showed sidekick when the last time that card had been edited. How this would work on different machines, whose system clock might not be in sync is anyone's guess.
It(SK97) also allows merging of calendars, but that could become much more complicated!

If the only thing you are using is the cardfile in this situation then I suggest an Access solution might be preferable...
HTH
Any other ideas out there?

Regards Jim
Check the FAQ area of this Forum for answers (If there are any FAQs!) , it could save you a lot of time and effort!

 

[creamer]

Thanks Jim for your time, it does sound perilous and indeed time consuming. I'll encourage them to look at an Access scenario I think!