Thanks for your thoughts.

Do you really need access to all your colleagues UDPs (User Defined Products) when you don't have Internet access?

Note that you can still open your projects and edit them - even if they have your colleagues UDPs in them as the project is completely self-contained.

Therefore, if you think you are going to need them when you don't have Internet access, then you can just add them to your project or a temporary project beforehand.

There are really 2 big issues with sharing UDPs:

1. What happens if 2 people make a change to the same UDP at the same time? We would just determine that latest takes priority.

2. If we synchronize everyones UDPs to everyone else then that is going to consume a LOT of bandwidth and storage on everyone's machine. Imagine one user puts a 10 MB image inside a UDP !! Everyone will suddenly get a copy of that and there is nothing they can do - except stop sharing the whole library.

If all UDPs are stored on the cloud and you just retrieve them when you want them, then you are only going to suffer the download if you happen to use that product in a project.

Remember - some people could produce thousands of UDPs and you may only want one or two of them.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

Hi David.

You ask a good question.

We are working on a solution that will make sharing your UDPs very easy, but it does make some assumptions...

Are all your colleagues on the same local area network? If so, do you all have access to a local SQL Server?

Do your colleagues need to access the UDP when they are "on the road" or "on-site"? In other words, do they need to have a local copy of the database?

Would it be satisfactory if this "shared database" was on the Internet/Cloud ?

We'd love to hear your thoughts so that we implement the right solution for you.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

Hi David.

Eric,

User Defined Products are stored in a SQL CE Database File: user.sdf which, on Windows 7, is stored in the following directory location:

C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Stardraw.com Ltd\Stardraw Design 7\1.0.0.0

You can copy this file onto other computers and you can then see and use the User Defined Products for use in your projects.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

I am currently starting a database of selected manufacturer libraries and several user defined products. This database of products will need to be accessable to anyone in the office who has StarDraw. I have made a standard template that would include the company title block and sheet layouts as per company standard and I was under the impression that when others would open this company template that the list of UDPS and manuf libraries would open with it, but from the few other computers I have tried the template on this doesn't seem to be the case. Could anyone please give me some insight on how I could go about making these libraries accessable by others (ideally they would automatically load when they open the template).

I believe our current config using Visio has all the products saved as a visio stensil template and we have those saved on to our internal server which is accessable to everyone. However, StarDRaw doesnt appear to allow me to save the manuf libraries that are applicable to us and the UDP's in this fashion so I am unsure how to go about making them accessible to others.

If someone could tell me how or where StarDraw does save these UDP's and selected manuf libs it might help me to figure out a way to make them accessable by others. Do the UDPs and selected manufs save on to each individual computer, within the StarDraw files on each computer, on to the USB activation key, into the drawing file or into an external file?

Thanks.

-Eric