If you track who is currently using your application you can send the message to only those users.

>>>In my VFP 6.0 SP2 appliation, I have been using some third party APIs to sent Broadcast messages over the Novell network. The idea being that if someone wanted to communicate with all the other currently signed on users of the application, they could click on Broadcast Message from the menu, type in some text, and send. The other users would receive the message in a Novell messagebox. Now we have some sites with Win2000 servers. I would like to move away from the Novell APIs totally, but provide the same functionality.
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>>>I first thought is to have the sender write their message and then write a text file to the server. A timer would look for the message every 30 seconds or so. When found it would format the text file message into a messagebox. I guess the sender would have to wait for a couple of minutes so that they would delete the text message on exit from the Broadcast Message form. I suppose that I would also have to have a built in check for any message text file > 3 minutes old would be deleted by the first user to FILE() it from the timer (safeguard for left over messages from system crash and such).
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>>>Does anyone have a better idea or more refinement to my idea???
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>>Why not add two tables to your database, one parent table containing the >messages, and the other table a child table indicating who should receive >each message? Your VFP application can periodically check to see if there >are any messages waiting to be read for the logged in user.
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>A Broadcast Message is sent now to all signed on users of the applications. It is not stored for later retrieval. So any current user of the application would get the message. Something like "The XXXXX application is coming down in 10 minutes for maintenance.". I do not want someone who signs on after the broadcast to receive the message.