Naomi,

>If each user is subscribed to their own folder, how exactly do you handle this? Are you saying that one folder on the Network is not a reliable solution?

I was not very clear, each user is subscribed to their own network folder. Well, I checked and in the ShutDown class they all subscribe to the same folder mainly because there will be just one file that we create when we start maintenance, the other two use a Users\User directory structure.

The idea is that when the application detects a folder event it will trigger it's "Refresh" or "Update" method, now if every user is subscribed to the same folder, then all the applications on the network will try to refresh simultaneously, which is not something desirable in the E-Mail or WorkToDo cases. For the maintenance we do subscribe all the users to the same folder for in this case we really want them to react simultaneously, but the thing is that this will not create any (or very little) network traffic while the other two usually do a requery() of views.

Now, I am sure you are thinking that we could anyways subscribe all users to the same folder, but to events for a particular file, each file different for each user, the problem with this approach is that if there are several files being created simultaneously (or fast enough) then the OS will not trigger an event for each file, instead it will consolidate them in one 'folder updated' event, which can lead to missing events.

By the way, the ShutDown, bad name for it actually is not a shutdown but a procedure to close all fox applications that the user is running, we do it in two steps, first, all users run a small stub application that shows the status of the "IT Maintenance" with an icon on the systray, this stub is "Listening" for events in the ShutDown\Start folder for a file called 'Do.It', when the file is detected, a form is displayed with a count down timer asking them to close all foxpro applications (usually each user run several, some of them are also systray applications, like worktodo) When the counter runs out of time it closes the warning form and writes a file with the name of the computer in the Folder ShutDown\Proceed, and all of our applications are 'listening' to that folder for a file with the name of the machine which they are running on, when they detect the file, they exit. We did it that way so there is only one warning no matter how many applications the user is running.

Well, I am not sure if I was clear this time, never was good with this writing thing