(Contents)(Previous)(Next)

Option for Sending Mail via the Server

When a user sends a mail message, OfficeTalk has to write several records. The number of records written increases as the number of recipients increases. For slower networks, sending a message to 10 or more people can take a noticeable time on a 16-bit machine. OfficeTalk offers a feature which causes clients to send mail by writing a single record regardless of the number of recipients of the message. This single record is a command which may be interpreted at a later time by the command processor service. The OfficeTalk server machine should be the machine which holds the OfficeTalk database on its local hard disk. The advantage of this arrangement is that it is much quicker for a remote machine to write a single record to the database than to write many records. Furthermore, there is no network traffic created by the server machine reading the command record and writing all the mail records itself. Since the database is held locally, it is much more efficient for the OfficeTalk server machine to write records to the database than for a remote client machine to write to the database.

Note: It is not necessarily advantageous to use this function if you use a SQL Server database, since all database records are inherently performed by a server machine. In such an environment this function will simply defer the inevitable database writes.

Checking the Sending of mail is done by server check box will cause all clients, which log on subsequently, to send mail by writing a command to the database.

Mail messages will not be sent until the server machine processes commands. You can process commands manually from the OfficeTalk Services dialog box. Selecting OfficeTalk Server… from the Options menu will display the OfficeTalk Services dialog box.

Select Command Processor Service from the list of services and press the Kick… button. For information on automatically kicking the command processor, see Command Processor Service.

Note: A supervisor may kick the command processor service from any machine but it is most efficient if the machine holding the database performs this action since it involves no network activity.


Next