> But the original question dealt with them using the same file. I > interpreted that to mean both read and write to the community of > information. With all of the schemes mentioned so far, you can read the > community of information, but you can't write back to it. With what you > are proposing, all users will have a copy of the information as of date > X, and after that it will be stale. It might be impossible to write a cobol emulator in VFP, but other things are feasible :) Create one common table for resource exchange, mark the records which will be shareable (use the Foxuser.dbf structure with an extra field), and have user set resource off use (set("reso",1)) && the user's private resource file ...freshen necessary records from common resource... use set reso on Upon exit, user may reverse action, and send some information into the common table. Filtering of information which gets distributed and which gets gathered is entirely up to you. The refresh rate, also - doing this at login/logout seems appropriate to me, but you might as well have a button somewhere to let user do it whenever he feels like it. > If all you need is read access to the resource file, or if you need a > copy of the resource file as of some time in the past, then the schemes > mentioned so far will work. If, however, you want to be able to update > the community of information, such as people sharing a calendar, then > you will have to use something other than the resource file. In this case, this seems like resource mail system - but then, why not use mail :)