CHALLENGE

Remotely synchronizing the local documents and databases of my outside reps?

Submitted by Eric Schiff, Albertson, NY

3 comments

Do you relate?

+17

I own an entertainment company that employs numerous in-house employees as well as six outside field representatives that work from home. Our field representatives travel throughout the day meeting with clients and surveying spaces to have events. During the course of the days the reps work on their laptops and update data in the Act database as well as take notes during meetings. At the end of the day, I need this information to be transmitted back to our servers over a VPN so that it is accessible to the rest of the inside staff. My problem is I do not know how to go about synchronizing the data and Act databases efficiently and without losing any information. I am looking for a solution where my remote reps can connect via a VPN, which currently exists, and automatically synchronize their data with our servers.

Join the conversation. Agree? Disagree? Provide your advice.

mwvisa1

Speaking of SyncToy, you may want to look at the Sync Framework on which it is built. I am diving into learning more about this myself, so can't offer any deep personal experiences with it right now other than just to point you to reference I found to research if you have developers available and willing to have semi-custom solution.

Microsoft Sync Framework
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sync/default.aspx

You can do databases as well as files regardless of the network topology from what I have read so far.

Regards,

Kevin (aka mwvisa1)
http://www.experts-exchange.com

LawrenceAbrams

There is no clear cut solution for synchronizing data between remote computers and a server. Many companies use free tools such as Microsoft' Sync Toy 2.0 (http://tinyurl.com/2cu9fh) and RoboCopy (http://tinyurl.com/4k28b), which was part of the Windows 2003 Server resource kit, but is now part of Windows Vista and Windows 7. using these tools they create batch files, or scripts, to launch these programs to synchronize files and data between two computers. Both of these do not, though, resolve any conflicts based around the content of the files, so if you have multiple people using the same file, it will not merge the data on sync, and thus this may not be the best tool for you.

What I would suggest is that you do a Internet search for synchronization software and try out the various ones you find. Almost all of them contain free trials where you can test the features. You can then create a shortcut or script that the user runs at the end of the day when they are connected to your network that will synchronize their local data with your servers.

ACT already contains the ability to synchronize databases hosted on your central server with ACT databases located on your outside reps laptops. Information and a tutorial on how to setup synchronization can be found at ACT's web site here:

http://download.act.com/tours/training/2010/Syn...

SmallNetBuilder

Do you just need files from laptops backed up to your server? Or you need the Act databases on the laptops to be synced to a central database?