Single workstation - Single-user


Single workstation ‚ Single- user

Small businesses are common and a software market well served by Visual FoxPro applications. These businesses might have a sole person who is the owner and only person at the company. This individual runs the business, performs a service for their clients , or builds the widgets they sell. The application they use to run their operation is loaded on the one company computer. The single workstation might initially seem to be the simplest deployment scenario, but it can be complicated by users not being computer literate, lack of maintenance to the machine, and lack of operating system security updates.

One of the complications of single computer deployments is making sure the data and other important files are backed up on a regular basis. In our experience, companies with a single computer often need more than just our software deployed; they need a complete computer maintenance service. The owners and even companies with an employee or two are busy enough running their operation they forget important computer operations that need to take place like backups .

An important point about the standalone environment is never write an application explicitly to only work for one computer with a single-user, meaning exclusive use. In our experience the majority of the cases, even if the user indicates they will never need multiple- user access, eventually will. Both their business grows and they add staff that needs access to the data or to the features of the application, or the application sells a second time to another client who needs this functionality. It is not much more work to enable a Visual FoxPro application for multiple-users if it is architected from the beginning to function in this manner. It is a lot of work to retrofit an application to be multi-user. There are legitimate reasons to limit the application to exclusive use such as the customer not paying for more than one user license, restricting access because of security, or lower the cost of testing in the multi-user environment. This does not mean you have to cripple the entire application so it is harder to enable in the future, rather build in a restrictive feature that turns exclusive off at the beginning of the main program start up. When the user calls asking for the multi-user version, toggle the feature on, do a little testing, and deploy the upgraded application.




Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions
Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions
ISBN: 1930919328
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 232

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