If your organisation is split across several physical locations and possibly several different networks, OfficeTalk provides a number of methods for connecting everyone.
For example, your organisation may be split across two separate locations, both connected via a wide area network and you wish to connect everyone so that they may share OfficeTalk data. One way to achieve this would be to use an SQL Serverâ database. Alternatively, you could use the JET engine and adopt a data replication strategy such that changes made to the data in each local workgroup could be replicated in each database. OfficeTalk provides methods for doing this for organisations which have either a high bandwidth network, a low bandwidth network, or no network at all connecting its different sites.
Multi-site organisations with a high bandwidth fixed connection or ISDN connection may consider connecting directly to the main database as if all sites belonged to the same local area network. Alternatively, for slightly lower bandwidth connections, each site would have its own workgroup database. Connections to other sites would only be made if a user specifically accessed data in those sites, for example, if a local user opened one of the diaries held at one of the other sites.
If each site is using the JET engine then both of the above configurations would require each user to have file based access to the other site. This is not a requirement if using SQL Server.
Multi site organisations with a low bandwidth connection between the sites, such as a modem connection, may configure OfficeTalk such that a local copy of each site's database is kept and, periodically, a connection is established to transfer the changes between the sites. This has the advantage that all local users need only connect to a local database in order to access the remote site's data. The disadvantage of this configuration is that the local database copy is never completely up to date. OfficeTalk can replicate the changes either by connecting directly to the remote database and transferring a single data record in each direction containing the relevant changes, or by sending and receiving changes using Internet mail. For more information see What Is Remote Workgrouping.