Laurisa,

Since I'm not sure what your company is trying to accomplish. It's difficult to respond meaningfully. But it appears that your having more of a remote access issue than AD. Here are a couple of options for using any VFP app remotely.

1) The most technically savy is to create a VFP COM DLL on an NT system and use it with CreateObjectEX in your applications to pass data back and forth. This is similar to the Active Server Pages approach. But as an experience ASP developer, I can tell you for simple apps its OK, but complex app soon become troublesome to run reliably. Another way along the same lines is as I spoke of before and migrate to a complete Client/Server approach.

2) A simpler approach is to code your application use UNC names instead of drive mapping (ie USE \\novellserver\vol1\myapp\data\data.dbf). This works well with both Novell and NT since the network does the work and drive mappings are not required (you had indicated that was a problem).

3) For remote access users, they can dial into the network and establish a RAS connection or access your network through VPN over the internet. This is acceptable for systems where the tables are small enough (as I believe you indicated).

4) To take step 3 further, you can use SQL Views in online/offline mode to 'cache' tables on users system locally. When Online, only changes are transmitted across the wire. These steps work well with legacy code since once the DBCs/Views and tables are setup, most of the existing code works without modification.

All of this requires a major change in thinking. Especially for legacy applications. It is definitely something that you should consider, since you would then be able to implement AD or several other remote access possiblities.

I hope this helps in some way.

-Ed