Pro Home Manager Personal Edition can be used by multiple users on the same computer network. The program will need to be installed at each workstation, but then files can be shared within the group so that, for example, you can work on a file for a particular home, and so can another family member, or your employee.
First, each workstation needs to have Pro Home Manager Personal Edition installed. As well, you need to established a common “mapped drive letter. We recommend that a subfolder rather that the root of the drive letter be your work area.. E.g. “T:\Our Managed Homes\” rather than “T:\”.
When updating records users can update any record at any time, but when updating the same record the last user to update the record will have their changes recorded. This is the only caveat. There are some notes below about making Windows behave more reliably especially regarding Microsoft’s Opportunistic Locking. So if you are going to us this in earnest, we suggest your tech staff follow the steps below.
Multi-user Issues:
Novell Issues:
I checked the related news groups and the Novell problems were due to sites using the MS network driver rather than Novell's Netware IPX driver. As well they report that caching and opportunistic locks on the Novell server should be turned off. It will either run or not run quickly from what I read and the one or two setting above are the one that cause of user slowdowns. Users seem to need full folder rights as well.
Microsoft Issues (Server and Workstation Sharing):
Microsoft has an issue with a technology called Opportunistic Locking not reporting back to programs file's true size under certain conditions. There are configuration changes for servers and workstations with shared drives. See below:
To have Pro Home Manager work under the best long term conditions on a true file server a special option needs to be adjusted.
- Go to your server
- Login as the administrator or using an ID with full administrative rights
- Go to the Control Panel.
- Select Administration Tools.
- Select Computer Management
- Select Device Manager, and expand the Disk drives item
- Right-hand click on each Disk drive and select the Properties Option.
- Go to the Policies Tab and ensure that the Enable write caching on the disk is disabled.
- Press the OK.
- Re-boot your server computer (this does not need to be done immediately but within a few days of starting up).
- Note: You do not have to do this change on workstations accessing the program.
To have Pro Home Manager work for the long term on your Workstation acting as a "shared folder" server a option needs to be adjusted. We do not recommend this option except for small numbers of users less than 5.
- Go to your server
- Login as the administrator or using an ID with full administrative rights
- Go to the Control Panel.
- Select Administration Tools.
- Select Computer Management
- Select Disk Management,
- Right-hand click on each Disk drive and select the Properties.
- Go to the Hardware Tab and select the shared hard drive
- Click the Properties Button
- Select the Policies Tab.
- Ensure that the Enable write caching on the disk is disabled. (unchecked)
- Press the OK.
- Re-boot your computer.
- Note: You do not have to do this change on workstations accessing the program
Other Tips:
1. Always use mapped drive letters for best performance over a network. Do not use UNC (Universal Naming Convention) e.g., \\MyServer\Pro Home Manager\..."
2. Do not put the application into the root of a mapped drive letter as that will stop the backup routine function when called.