The only good way to sync over a VPN

[EddieVenus]

I have been fighting ACT! for a little over 3 years now. I have tried every trick in the book to make ACT work for our remote sales and remote support personel. I have used shared folders and email and dial up and on and on and on. So far they all SUCKED!!!!

The problem with shared folders is that it takes minutes and hours to sync. With email it is faster, but still slow, and requires user intervention. Even after all this time only Outlook can do it with little or no user intervention within ACT! Even the built in email requires the user to manually download the messages.

I know that this is a simple fix, and perhaps already in wide use. But it was new to me, and will be new to someone else I am sure. It is easy. A .bat file. Ta-da. Done.

I was scripting some stuff for a server and thought how easy it would be to make a .bat file to copy the contents of the sync folder to a local drive then tell ACT! to uses shared folders for its sync process, only instead of using the "shared" folder, you use a local one. Shared folder use is painfully slow, windows copies those same files in nearly 1/240th the time. That means that a file that takes windows a second will take ACT 4 minutes to copy. How lame. Just make a .bat file that says this in it.


@echo off
move "C:\Documents and Settings\user\My Documents\ACT\To main DB\*.*" "S:\ACT\DATABASE\From Remote user\"
move "S:\ACT\DATABASE\\To Remote user\*.*" "C:\Documents and Settings\user\My Documents\ACT\from main DB\"
end


That is it. Now put this in a shortcut that makes it run minimized, give the ACT! icon for good measure. Add it to the Task Scheduler to run 5 10 15 minutes before and/or after each sync that ACT! has scheduled. And you are all set.

thanks for listening to the rant, I feel better now
EV

 

[manukuttan79]

Hi Eddie,

I found your message pretty useful.

On the same grounds let me ask you a question.

I ve got a Central ACT database in my country with 2 sales guys connected to it as users.

Apart from this i ve got 3 other databases located in 3 different countries, and to each one of these i ve got 2 users.

At the end of the day i want to synchronize the 3 databases with my Central ACT database.

I would appreciate if you could suggest the best method for synchronization.

Thanx

 

[EddieVenus]

Sorry to not get back to you on this till now. I do not check this forum often.

What I do know is that I do not know how to sync database to database like that. I only do database to user, only ever needed to do it this way. But if I were to guess, i would think that the same rules would apply. To do a DB to DB sync. Set it up locally, then push or pull the files all to one place, well 4 places really. I would have the DBs all sync with each other in a kind of meshed arena. DB1 sends a sync to DB2, DB3 and DB4. DB2 sends to DB1, DB3 and DB4. Etc, etc. I would then have the batch file/script push/pull the syncs to all the locations. Then after they have all sent to each other, wait a minute and do it again. This way they all have the latest versions of all the DBs every night.

But that would take some tweaking I am sure, these things never work the first time the way we think they will, or maybe just the way I think they will.

Eddie Venus