>Hi. I read this thread with interest as I would like to know how to apply version updates in a 'live' multi-user environment without logging out all users. It was mentioned in passing in Thread #247225 that one can point the user's desktop icon to a server-side batchfile which could then search the server for a new version and load that one instead. Does anybody have experience of this? How can I write and implement such a batchfile? Thanks.

A batch file doesn't have the necessary intelligence to do this; you have several approaches available to you.

The most common one is to rethink how your applications are started; you can write a launcher application that resides on each user's system, examines components (executables, COM components, etc.) in a common server diretory and checks to make certian that the most recent versions of files are on the user's system before the application is started. A good source of information on this was an article written by Doug Hennig in FoxTalk STARTAPP: The Best of Both Worlds in the October 1997 issue; you can go to www.pinpub.com/foxtalk and download the article and related source code from the Web site for $5.

You can alternatively use a product like Microsoft's SMS to 'push' changes to user systems; SMS is a great way to ensure that you have control over common environments for all users from a central managment facility on a network. SMS is a part of Microsoft's backoffice platform; other vendors, including Novell, have competing products that can do similar things. SMS and similar products provide a good way to ensure that all kinds of common configuratiuons are kept up to date in a LAN environment, but it's not a cheap alternative. It has the advantage of not requiring a rewrite of applications and of managing update packages in an orderly, schedulable basis.