>Ed,
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>Many thank for your time in replying. I already use PCAnywhere to dial into clients and your suggestion certainly makes sense. But what if there is more than 1 potential remote user.....presumably only one remote user at a time could dial in otherwise you would need any number of PCs at base location to be taken over by the remote users. Also, George Allen replied suggesting using data synchronization using VFP COM - which I havent come across. Any thoughts on this?
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Usaing PCAnywhere and modems, it's a machine and phone line per off-site user accessing the app at the same time. Two PCs, each with a modem, and a rollover phone scheme, coudl accomodate two remote users. You've seen PCAnywhere, and know the basic drill.

You can have more than one PC running PC Anywhere, each with a modem and rollover line, or if the office had a means of continuous connection to the Internet, several PCs running PC Anywhere reachable via some sort of VPN, or WTS (Windows Terminal Server), possibly in conjunction with a hardware implementation like Citrix, all address the same basic idea of run the app locally on one or more machine and use thin-client connectivity to attach a remote PC to the app's UI. I can spend as much money as you care to throw at the problem; give me a liberal budget and adequate time, I can certainly find all kinds of approaches to doing this to better meet your needs - the key issues are (1) is the real problem just a need for someone to dial up from outside and connect to your app the way it works now on an occasional basis, (2) what are the long-term requirements that differ from implementing a quick and relatively low-cost provision for intermittent dial up access to use the app that's in place now, and (3) do you have the time and resources to devote to more than the original problem posed, how to dial-in from a laptop and run the app occasionally from outside your office?

Data synchronization would entail rearchitecting your application extensively, with intermittent interconnection to update/synchronize the data between the remote systems and the central LAN. Such rearchitecting is certainly possible; any of several n-tier design styles could result in a VFP application that could accomodate both LAN and remote user interfaces. A web-centric design might make sense, or off-site data replication/synchronization on a scheduled basis, or deployment of the whole thing using an application server and thin client technology are three distinct approaches that might be applicable to the problem. Rearchitecting would make sense if the basic premise behind the app you have now needed reexamination in any case, but entails having a significantly larger budget for attacking the problem and availability of more time to implement the solution.

Adding a PC with a NIC, dial-up modem, putting in a phone line and installing PCAnywhere on the new machine is a finite, relatively inexpensive, and fairly quickly deployable way to do what you originally asked about - I suspect that the limiting factor would be the time it would take to add a phone line or drop the new machine onto the LAN. If what you really have is a long-term, ongoing issue that extends beyond the problem you initially posed, at least investigating other options may be worthwhile.

Investing in a copy of Rick Strahl's book "Internet Applications with Visual FoxPro 6.0", reading it, and seeing if any of the technologies he discusses there make sense in terms of sorting out your long-term goals would seem a worthwhile expenditure of both time and money regardless of how you decide to approach the problem. It's a good book that addresses one technology in detail, and it presents some of the competing options that would be worth considering. And Rick writes well.

>Final question (!) Do you know or can u recommend any VFP training organisations in your area. I am looking to send people to the US for VFP training as things tend to be more advanced in the US than in the UK.
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In my relatively local area, several - I believe that AppDev's courses are run periodically in my area (Jim Booth is tied in with their stuff and lives within a half-hour of me, and IMO, it'd be tough to come up with a better VFP instructor than Jim.) You have places like MEI and Flash Creative Management within a two hour drive of my location; I'm about midway between Boston and NYC, so there are a number of good companies at hand. Depending on the number of people involved, it might make sense to bring someone in at your site to run courses right there, the cost of having someone come on site and work with your staff for several weeks, addressing your problems on a first-hand basis, could make lots of sense. Not knowing how many people should be trained, or what level of training is needed, makes it tough to say where to go - I know people who've been through training both done by MEI and through AppDev, and both companies have proven track records for teaching VFP.

For that matter, if you think they could survive the abuse, I could probably do it...the rumors that I use cattle prods on my students are unproven allegations at best! < g >