>I'm baa-aack! After a lovely week off, I'm in my new job and, of course, already need the good folks of the UT.
>
>What's the best answer for security in VFP 3? The tables will be on the server and of course access will be tightly controlled inside the app, but we all know that the DBFs can be opened, viewed, etc through Excel, Word, WP, and a host of other applications.
>
>The data is customer info, and we don't want users to be able to see the whole table, or copy out the table into their own directory and use it.
>
>Do I want to encrypt it? Doesn't that have a lot of overhead? ANy third party products out there?
>
>BTW, not to start a war, but I'm working on a Mac now and feel like such a flippin' newbie. I really like the Mac, but it's like learning French.

I have a few ideas...

First of all, I think Access is the only app that can view tables from within a DBC. It can't edit it, only view it.

Second, how secure do you need it to be? If you're that concerned, maybe you should consider using a back-end data server like SQL Server or Sybase.

Third, I've also heard of apps where users are granted read-only access to certain files and sometimes all files. Updates are done via temporary files that are stored in a public location and are pulled into the real data by a system process on a timer.

I'm sure others have better ideas, that's just my crack at it.

P.S. No matter how secure you make it, if someone wants the information bad enough, they can probably get it. And if they're that good, you may not even know about it.