Todd,
Thanks for the information.

Can you recommend ANY documentation/papers/articles regrding the ACTUAL capabilities/limitations of OLE - anything I have been able to locate was strictly OLE-1?

Cheers,
Jim N.

>>Todd,
>>
>>This subject interests me greatly, so I thought I would double-check some of the thing you replied. You obviously have the experience which I lack, and documentation is also severely lacking.
>>
>>The originator stated that he had use GETOBJECT (note, NOT CREATEOBJECT) to access the SAME task on the Server.
>>Now you say that "classes are not shareable. . . and thus each user creates their own instance...". Does this mean that a GETOBJECT simply starts up another thread in the same "task area"? If that is the case, then there is not much of an overhead sving by employing GETOBJECT, is there?
>>
>>My main concern (at the moment) is understanding HOW OLE manages multiple clients for a single Server (assuming the Server to be on another machine). Specifically, does the single Server have to keep track of all of the thing like who's message am I processing at this time, where do I send the reply to, etc OR does OLE take care of all that, so that the Server essentially ignores that stuff, simply processing methods and returning values (OLE keeping track of who it is being done for and where it is to go).
>>
>>In the second instance it would imply that Server programs are RE_ENTRANT programs and that OLE dispatches it on behalf of the various clients.
>>
>>Your insight will be appreciated
>>Jim N.
>
>Currently OLE is not multiuser. That's the core of your problem which
>hopefully CAIRO will fix. The getobject command will prevent a reinstancing of an object that is opened BY THAT USER. This prevents a
>single user from opening Excel twice etc. It does not recognize objects opened by other users. Again each server in OLE treats each client as
>if it were the only client on that server, no interaction between other servers is done within the class. Now when you write data to a table on disk (must be to the disk, not just memory, thats what all the tableupdate stuff is all about) and the table is set to sharable, then other users can share the same data.
>
>HTH