User Collaboration on Files/Procs/Locking/Session Sharing

[humbletech99]

I have users who constantly run in to file sharing problems where one person is holding open a file they need to use which results in support calls to find the person and possibly terminate their process to release the file.

This kind of thing lends users to actually sharing sessions so that if 1 user goes on holiday, another user can pick up their work, check that long process they are running is still working or collect the results. If somebody is out of the office for whatever reason, they tend to call a colleague to watch their process is working or make modifications and re-run it, so there is a lot of collaboration between users. If the user's process is hung, it holds the lock on the file and this causes problems too if the other user in the office cannot access the session of the first user.

I'd like to know how people out there handle these kinds of issues.

How do your users collaborate?

Some more background:

Users run big intensive processes in things like Visual FoxPro on DBF files. These processes can run for many hours, overnight, through the day etc...

Users are using Windows 2003 Terminal Servers with their own sessions logged in with their individual user accounts. There exist a small amount of shared access accounts that all users know the password to and they can just dive in and share processes and things in this way, much to my reluctance, but this follows the business structure of people working in teams for clients and sharing work.

Some work is done on workstation class machines with a single shared account, although I am really trying to stamp this out in favour of the terminal servers.

Does anyone have any ideas on this whole collaboration between users including ideas on how to deal with:

- File Locking

- Process Sharing (ie let one user control another's process)

- Session sharing

I'd really like to maintain separate accounts and eliminate shared accounts or some users having to tell other users their passwords to access their sessions and processes.

Ideas and Feedback welcome

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

What kind of files are these users sharing? What are they doing to these files - read only, or updating?

If for instance they are Word documents that are only viewed, then the users should simply open these documents in read-only mode.

If whatever documents they are need to be updated, then a different approach is needed. Maybe something similar like source code management, where files are checked out for exclusive update, then checked in when the update is complete. Complex source code management systems will even allow multiple user check-out, with individual changes merged at check-in.

I don't know about process sharing or session sharing; that does not sound like a Windows concept to me. (?)

[humbletech99]

The files are DBF files with Visual FoxPro as mentioned in the background section. This is not simply a matter of read-only in Office.

These files are not suitable for revision control, they change radically and often and this would put a burden on the users as well as being the completely wrong solution for this type of data. Revision control is really for program code.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Sorry, I didn't read it carefully. What are DBF files - some kind of database files? Aren't they controlled by some kind of dbms system?

[humbletech99]

Sorry, I didn't read it carefully. What are DBF files - some kind of database files? Aren't they controlled by some kind of dbms system?

Visual FoxPro as mentioned in the background section. No it's just file level access. Each person runs their own Visual FoxPro process. Hence the need for some ideas on collaboration on file locking and process sharing.