Can an EF Mail Library be effectively shared amongst 4-5 workstations?

Hi,

I’m wondering if an EF Library which harvests email from the main source of incoming email regarding orders, enquiries and follow ups can be effectively shared among several users working on different workstations. ie more that one user can access the library simultaneously if it is held in a shared folder.

If possible, this would be an excellent way to avoid the cost and inconvenience of setting up an email server which we don’t really need just yet.

Reading between the lines of other postings I get the impression that we may need separate copies of each library with some way of syncing information among them all.

John Wolff
Hamilton, New Zealand

Each EagleFiler library should only be open on one Mac at a time. In this case, I think it would be easier for you to have a single library in a shared folder that people take turns using, rather than trying to sync multple libraries.

Of course, since the records in the library are stored in regular files, different people can access them at once via the Finder, provided that you don’t move them around—this is probably less useful in an e-mail context, though, since you’d see the mailbox files but not the messages in the Finder.

Thanks for your answers, Michael.

Would it be easier to copy the EF library from the originating site out to the satellite workstations at the start of each working day yet capture their email correspondence back into the original library on a shared folder?

We already do this type of manouevre on our debtors file. The daily copy is just for looking up historical invoices and is never used for any new information.

Just trying to think of ways of setting up a usable library with a few rules which can easily be respected and therefore followed.

Cheers,

John Wolff

Yes, I think so. To clarify, in order to capture the e-mail from the satellite Macs, what you’d need to do is have them export the mail into a folder in the shared folder that’s not inside the library, e.g. a folder called “To Import” next to the .eflibrary file. Then, at the end of the day, open the library on the master Mac and import everything in the “To Import” folder.