Hi,

I went back and re-read your initial post more carefully. I apologize for providing you with beginner advise, but I throght I was helping a newbie. If you felt insulted it was not intensional.

From what I've gathered re-reading our thread, you have a lot of work ahead of you. If you provide more information about your current situation, I think someone hear could give some pearls or wisdom from thier experience. For example, is your datastore centralized or does the data reside only in the 400 remote locations. I would assume the data resides in the remote locations and is then summarized and submitted to a centralized Office, as it would seem a Visual FoxPro centralize datastore would not provide the capacity needed to support 400 decentralized offices, because the largest table size Visual FoxPro can handle is 2G at this time. Also, do you have any security issue. Since your system was based partly on the unix operating system, must the solution be cross platform capable. Is security enforce at only the operating system level or is security also needed to access the datastore. How prominent of a role does being able to access the data remotely play? What is your timetable and how big is your support staff. Are you looking for a long term solution, or do you need to apply some bandaids immediately?

My experience is mostly working with small to very small companys in a local network environment. Visual FoxPro is a wonderful product, but SQL Server is a better solution for company's working with large datasets, or where sensitive security issue are involved. Also, SQL Server may make more sense where it is necessary to work with data remotely. Web services may be an answer because it allows cross-platform interaction through XML which facilitates the transfer of data between remote locations, but it is new a still evolving. Microsoft .Net is here, but it suffers bloat and is slow and brand new. It could take a year just to lay a foundation for a new app and to climb the learning curve before you write your first "hello world" program. Also, it's likely to be expensive and hard to maintain with a never ending stream of new releases, service pack, and service contract renewals. For me it would be kind of like using an 800 pound grilla to pick up a paper clip. Also, there is no guarantee that .Net will go. It seem to be a solution targeted for a large scale operation like yours, but it may not fit into your time frame. Good luck.