Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with shared

MS Access - Limit to # of shared users

cg1 — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:04:10 -0800

Is there a limit to the # of users who can share a Microsoft Access database across a network? I've been working in Filemaker for so long that it's been a while since I designed in Access. I'm now working for a public school that has no money, but all its machines have Access. The school *really* needs a database, so I'm considering building one using expertise from my previous life in the business world.

Several questions:

- Assuming all 100 teachers in our school has Access on the PC in their classroom, could all 100 access the same Access database simultaneously without problems? I know that Filemaker has a user limit of 250, but that requires Filemaker Server (a separate / more expensive software) be installed on at least the server itself. Does Access have similar limitations?

- Does Access support a web-based module, that teachers not in the building / not on the school network could access? If so, is it worth a damn?

- Is Access easier to design in now than it was years ago (when I switched to Filemaker and was thrilled how much simpler it was)?

Thanks in advance for any help,
Wade

How can a writing workshop share their work online?

patnasty — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:32:24 -0800

What would be the best web-based file hosting service to use as a shared "Documents" folder for the various members of my writing workshop? I'm looking for a cheap (or even free!) way to set up a communal web storage folder so that the members of my writing workshop and I can make the latest drafts of our work available to one another in between workshop meetings.

Here are the tricky bits:

Many of my workshop-mates are fairly technophobic. If the login/uploading process is at all difficult-looking, they won't use it. Also, it would be probably be best that it not require the downloading of any sort of desktop client, unless the installation and configuration thereof would be simple enough for an 80 year old grandmother who was raised in a remote region of the Brazilian rainforest, by monkeys.

Finally, we'll be using several different document types. Some will be using regular docs, some will be using the screenwriting program Final Draft's proprietary format, and some will be using the format used by the open source screnwriting program, Celtx. It would probably be asking too much for the hosting service to automatically convert these various formats into PDF or something, so I'm pretty much resigned to having to go on and do some converting on my own... but it would be nice if, once I convert the document to PDF or HTML, for people to be able to just click on a document to read it.

Oh, and it'd be best if I could set up sub-folders for the various members of the group, so our stuff isn't all mixed up together.

So... any suggestions?

iTunes library sharing

anonaccount — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:50:42 -0800

I'm having a party at the weekend and planned on playing some music in the garden using iTunes - I need some help setting this up! My main music library is in my room on a beastly desktop. I planned to hook up my old iBook G4 to some speakers in the garden to play from the shared music library on my desktop machine.

This works - however it plays all music, not just the "checked" songs. I also can't use the iTunes DJ on a shared library (which would be ideal, as I want people at the party to cue up music rather than interrupting the flow).

1) Can I share only "checked" songs? (I know i can do single playlists - but I have a huge library and I really don't want to have to go through selecting just the checked songs to make the new playlist)
2) Can I hack iTunes DJ into working with a shared playlist?

I have an iPod too - if that helps!

I thought I was the only one who thought I was the only one...

phrontist — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 04:50:14 -0800

Is there a term for that feeling when you realize someone else notices (or notices in a particular way) something you had never thought of anyone else paying attention to, or viewing similarly? This American Life (the radio show) is a good example of that feeling... kind of "Oh man, I can't believe other people feel that way or notice that" (David Sedaris aims for this, and whether you find him funny seems to depend on whether you react this way to him). This thread, and askmefi in general, is also good example. The humor of many of the Cohen brother's films, in particular The Big Lebowski, seems largely derived from this. Walter, in that film, is not just amusing as an imagined person, but because the coen brothers seem to be saying "isn't it funny how some people are like this". Another example would be when you learn a new word for something you'd never considered other people considering - I felt this way about "phosphenes". Ya know what I mean?

cross platform shared address book

cowmix — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:29:21 -0800

What is the best / easiest shared cross platform shared address book solution out there? I'm a part of a small organization (50 people) spread across the country. Our company uses Linux (Thunderbird), Mac (Mail.app) and Windows (Outlook). What is the best solution to setup that will allow all of use to share a common contact list? I'm assuming LDAP will be used for address lookups but what is the best way to allow people to add entries. If not a LDAP based solution, what else can we use?

How do we pay for this mistake?

Anonymous — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 16:02:57 -0800

AskMe the Ethicist: how do we divide this plumbing bill among 3 roommates (or am I a jerk for not wanting to split it evenly) We are three roommates.

One of us (the one who is a relatively recent arrival to the US) flushed a bowl of stew--containing pork bones--down the toilet, creating a massive plug and a $200+ plumbing bill our angry landlord won't cover, for obvious reasons.

If we divide it equally by 3 (the flusher apologized via email for a "bad decision" but hasn't mentioned or offered to take financial responsibility), I'm $80 in the hole I didn't budget for, for someone else's mistake. This is a lot of money for me.

However, the flusher hasn't been around to talk to since this happened, and the other roommate is hesitant to ask her to help defray the cost....we are all nice people trying to be nice, but if she hasn't offered to pay more than a third, is it bitchy to ask? Should I let it go in the interests of peaceful domestic relations? I honestly don't know. I don't want to create hard feelings or be "the bad guy", but again, it's a real chunk of change-- I don't normally spend that much ever, unless it's a bill, due to the frugal way I've had to live the last few years.

On the other hand, a comfortable, friendly living environment is important to me as well.

I'd write Randy Cohen but I suspect the turnaround here will be faster.

Advice / Guidlines on handling floater laptops?

bartleby — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:45:51 -0800

Any tips on "floater" (e.g. check out generic laptop #6 for the day) laptop policies and procedures? Several people who need to do occasional fieldwork/travel were given "desktop replacement" laptops, with the idea that it would be easier to pop the laptop off a docking station and go.

But reports are that they're just not performing as well, or as administrated as easily, as a PC tower for day-to-day operation. TCO turns out to be too high, especially since they're only needed for fieldwork 4 or 5 weeks a year total - meaning people are stuck using an unneccesarily weak machine for the other 45 weeks a year.
Consensus is that they'd rather go back to towers than get better desktop replacment laptops.

So the idea is to get these folks new towers, but to keep these laptops as generic floaters to be checked out when needed. They're older Thinkpads, and with some polishing, would be fine for fieldwork purposes.

If you've done this, or something like it, any tips would be appreciated.
Storing them so they're updated and ready to grab and go? (because of the software used, it's necessary to run updates almost weekly - any way to make it less of a chore?)
Security? (TrueCrypt the hard drives?, preventing out-of-sight-out-of-mind problems?)
Logins? (6 laptops, shared by 12 users, and we don't use roaming profiles. Just a generic login for each one?)

Table to projector data gathering system?

SirStan — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:26:21 -0800

Large group conference, need to display transcribed thoughts on a wall for everyone to see. Are there any solutions (inside or outside the box) that would essentially allow me to make a scrolling list of "ideas" collected from people walking around groups in a meeting room of 100 people?

Ideally it would be a laptop/projector reading from a central database of some sort, and people would enter things into the database and the application would display the updated items.

We would really like ~3 laptops roaming out... but a brief search turns me up without much except perhaps instant messaging, or VNC and MIcrosoft word.

No internet access will be available.

Shared Outlook Categories firmwide = possible?

bartleby — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:03:18 -0800

Is there a way to share Outlook Categories / Master Category list across all users on an Exchange server? Company has several thousand Contacts in a shared Public folder (separate from each user's own default/personal Contacts) = "Company Contacts" on its Exchange server (using Outlook 2003 at their desks, Exchange/Server 2003 at the server).

There are several dozen Categories applied to these Contacts (which branch handles them, what type of services they provide, who manages the account, etc.).

As it is now, that list of Categories has to be re-built for each new user/workstation MANUALLY, as the Categories in Outlook seem to bind to the individual Outlook account.

To deal with this, we have simply centralized the addition & categorizaion of new Contacts to a few individuals in the firm, and maintained their Categories lists accordingly. Easy enough.

But there's a move on to spread that responsibility out to everyone - so everyone will need that list of categories so that they can properly categorize Contacts they add to that shared list.

Is there a way to share/deploy a Master Categories list firmwide, at one go? I really don't want to have to manually enter those Categories for each and every user profile.

Seems like there must be a way - everyone is using the same Exchange server, same version of Outlook 2003, etc - but I'm coming up empty.

Global Negociated asynchronous calenders?

|n$eCur3 — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:43:55 -0800

Looking for a web based calendar service that allows me to set n blocks of time on my schedule for phone interviews. Interviewees each get to pick exactly one block from the remaining slots available, until all blocks are filled. I am willing to pay a fee for this service, but free is preferable. I'd like as little set up as possible.

Important: I'd like the calendar to work across multiple time zones and countries (candidates will be all over the world). So, each interviewee will see a view of the remaining time blocks adjusted to their personal time zone.

This service would make my life significantly better. Does this exist?

Image hosting for sharing.

[insert clever name here] — Mon, 21 May 2007 09:22:42 -0800

Looking for an image hosting solution that allows anyone to upload photos with some sort of approval process. All the image hosting solutions out there I've found so far are based around either one person make an account and uploading your own photos, or other users within that site/community being able to add to your album. I need something that allows anyone to upload without making an account, and then the account owner can approve them. Same goes for comments for the photos, if available.

Ideally it would also be something geared towards integrating with another site, though not entirely necessary.

I've found these features in a lot of photo gallery software, but not so much in hosting solutions. Help would be much appreciated.

iTunes and shared libraries

Pinback — Mon, 14 May 2007 22:30:28 -0800

iTunes: is there any way of making it look at "Shared" music by default? So, my iTunes library is stored on a network drive on a Linux SMB server. This works fine for iTunes on my desktop machine, an old eMac - the network drive is set to automount, and iTunes is happy. I fiddled with daapd (an iTunes server; basically the unix equivalent to checking "share my library on my local network" in iTunes) yonks ago, but it was a bit limited then.

Fast-forward to a few days ago, when my shiny new MacBook turned up. After setting up the wireless network, I investigated daapd again. The latest incarnation (Firefly Media Server) works well enough for my laptoppy purposes, and I've got it set up and working.

The only remaining problem/annoyance is that iTunes on the MacBook defaults to opening the (empty) local library at startup. I have no desire to copy my library over to the laptop, nor to automount that network drive (as it won't always be available). Is it possible to have iTunes default to browsing a shared library instead?

(To illustrate: when I start iTunes I want to see this, not this.)

Needing shared hosting that doesn't suck

zek — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 10:39:04 -0800

I need a recommendation for decent shared hosting (NOT Dreamhost.. see inside). Every Dreamhost site I've set up has had serious latency problems (and I've run 10 of them under 2 accounts). Just last week I set up a new site on Dreamhost, on yet another server I've never seen before, and boom, right off the bat, 4-second latency on all page loads. Dammit! Last summer I tried Verio from a recommendation and it sucked worse, and had downtime to boot.

My basic requirements are 4 GB of storage, about 40 GB a month of bandwidth, PHP, MYSQL, and shell. I'm going to be running MediaWiki with tons of content but it won't be busy at all. I don't mind paying a little extra, say in the $15-25/mo range, but $50 for a dedicated server is too much. A U.S. server is preferred.

Can anyone vouch for shared hosting that doesn't suck? Has anyone moved away from Dreamhost and found better performance?

Packing two users/computers into one

strangeleftydoublethink — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 09:41:00 -0800

I'm consolidating two Mac computers with unique users onto one new machine. What's my best process for setting up the users so that they can share iTunes and iPhoto libraries? Should I create the admin account and add the two users separately or let one of the users (the power user) be the admin account and add the non-power user as a non-admin? My primary concern is to make it easy to migrate their existing data over to the new machine and to consolidate their iTunes and iPhoto libraries so they can both use the same libraries for those apps.

Are there any issues with putting the iTunes library in a shared folder when it comes to permissions? They both have their own iPods and I want them to be able to purchase, add playlists, etc., off the shared library.

Document management on a shared hosting server?

sprocket87 — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:43:18 -0800

Help me find an online document management system / digital asset management system. I'm looking for a document management system (DMS) / digital asset management system (DAM) for my scanned documents. I plan to store all of my important documents, from credit card statements to bills to receipts to insurance info, etc, digitally. I'll be using a scanner with ADF & duplexing to digitize my papers. I need a management system to organize and archive them.

Ideally, I'd like to have some software that can be set up on Dreamhost for a hosted solution. However, to allow for more flexible responses, here are my overall stipulations:

1. Must be free or inexpensive. See 2.

2. Must be hosted online. I don't trust local copies (hardware failure/fire/theft/etc). This applies to portable (DVD, etc) media as well. It does NOT need to be a hosted system per se, in that Company X provides the DMS/DAM software and hosts it. I am willing / would prefer to use a 3rd party host, such as Dreamhost, for cost reasons. They are much more flexible in that they offer tons of storage and bandwidth and whatever else you want for a much lower cost. I don't want to pay $X/mo just for an online DAM. I am willing to pay $X/mo for a shared host that allows me to host anything else I want as well though.

3. Must be somewhat easy to install, configure and use, whether it is a provided & hosted service or a service I set up on a shared host.

4. Does not have to control my scanning experience; I can use a separate tool to get the files digitized but I'm looking for the DSM/DAM service to organize them. Obviously an online service wouldn't have much control over my hardware anyway :)

5. Should have the usual DMS/DAM features: File indexing for a wide array of filetypes (doc/pdf/all images/tiff/archives/etc), support OCR if possible, allow categories and advanced naming/file control, exporting, etc.

I love the looks of Linux DMS tools like DocMGR, but the setup looks somewhat overwhelming. I'm comfortable with basic Linux tasks, but configuring a shared host is a bit confusing to me. Is there any way to even set up such services on a shared host? For instance, is it possible to install DocMGR on Dreamhost? I suspect not, as it uses PostgreSQL and Dreamhost uses MySQL. But beyond this limitation, how does one go about installing their own applications on a shared host? I mean, Dreamhost provides a shell prompt, but not root - are you even allowed to install software? And what about dependencies, etc?

I know Dreamhost offers several "One-click" installable services, like MediaWiki, Wordpress, Joomla, etc, but I don't think any of these are exactly what I'm looking for. I'm assuming it's possible to set up some other service, albeit with more work, but I'm not having much success finding documented "How To's" for this. For instance, how to set up docmgr/doxfs/etc on a shared host.

Also, I know there are some basic Windows tools like PaperPort and Docsvault that do a great job of managing local copies of digital files, but I want them online. I understand I could simply backup a directory to an online host, but I'm thinking a hosted database would be preferable for advanced administration, etc.

Obviously I have a lot of "wants" so this is pretty wide open. Understand that I'm not a corporation and don't need any huge DAM solutions, but I'd like something a little more advanced than a basic client-side software.

Useful University moving in tips?

philsi — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:53:09 -0800

Any useful tips for settling in to first week in college / university? Any funny anecdotes of your first week in college / university? Next Tuesday I'm off to university (Winchester in the UK if it makes any difference), and it's going to be my first time living away from home, with new people, and wondered if people have any useful tips for settling in, living in shared accomodation for the first time (there will be 6 or 8 bedrooms going onto an adjoining kitchen area)? Social tips for those of us who aren't big drinkers?

Any key hints / tips that you found helpful / were told were important but not?

Sharing a DVD drive (and watching movies) on a LAN

rinkjustice — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 19:59:59 -0800

A three pc LAN (running 2000/XP) but only one dvd drive. I'd like the other two pc's to be able to watch dvd movies from that shared drive... The problem is, all I'm seeing in the dvd drive/movie disk on the other computers is audio and video directories and alot of IFO/BUP/VOB files - no dvd menu or autostart file - no movie. I'm using VideoLAN and a codec-loaded Windows Media Player with no success. Help from the hive in configuring this proper would be awesome.

If it's something obvious, I apologise. It's late, I'm tired, and I've run out of patience.

Go with the (work)flow.

quadog — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 09:53:05 -0800

I work at a small design firm. On our staff are several people responsible for drumming up new business. They would like to be able to edit and update text/images to a sales document. They want do this without having to task one of the designers to work on it. They want to be able to do it themselves without screwing anything up. This is a 14 page introductory sales document. It could be easily templated with some pages consisting of columns of text and other pages consisting of images of the work with accompanying captions. This document will be used in various mediums, on-screen client presentations (via powerpoint or acrobat), as a file that can be emailed (via pdf) and will be printed as hard copy on a color printer (from InDesign?). I want to set up a system that is bulletproof. They should be able to add/edit/swap text and images without a steep learning curve and without screwing anything up.

What are some ideas on how best to accomplish this? Should I begin with an InDesign file and have all the text imported via an XML doc. That way they only need to edit the XML doc and review changes in InDesign. Should I do the same with the images? Have them name the files appropriately and link them to the InDesign for automatic updates. I've never seen an example of how something like this is done so any suggestions would be helpful.

GiftFilter

jmgorman — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 09:35:51 -0800

My SO and I need gifts for our families. Of course this is really late and we are kinda broke. [+] We moved to a new house in a new city and are experiencing an (adjusted for cost of living) income reduction. Because of the breadth of both of our families we thought it might be more practical to buy gifts for each for all to share on Xmas day (will have to send by mail). My family = 3 brothers + parents, her = sister + mom + new husband. Any Ideas?