First, just know that I know just enough to be dangerous - so my terminology may be off. A quick background of our program might help. I started working with Q&A about a year before the whole Year 2000 scare. I was hired to convert their system from Q&A to Access. Of course I fell in love with Q&A and the ease/speed right away. I am not a programmer so the conversion was very slow and difficult - lots of scouring forums to learn how to do things. Anyway, we were able to stay with Q&A and it is a good thing because the Access application crawled along.
We are a private money lender (yes, loan shark) and we generate loans and then sell the notes to private parties. If the loan is large, we sell the note to multiple investors and if it is small, one investor will buy the note. We track some 600 fields of data on each loan and then in a separate system we track the larger investments, the investors, capital added, interest due. etc. Each entity has multiple investors who each can have one or more capital contributions and then monthly interest paid out. The Q&A Database was 23MB and has 12 years of history.
Now to the specifics. We have a simple network set up using all dell computers. Our server has a Pentium 4 1.2GHz with 768 MB Ram running Windows 2000 Small Business Server Service Pack 4. We have 13 (only 11 use Q&A and now Sesame) people connected to the server with a switch. Most of the workstations are Windows 98 SE and three of them run Windows XP Pro.
I have been working with Sesame since the middle of the beta tests and have really just done what is in the User Guide and the Multi-User Installation Guide that came with our license disk. It has been a piece of cake to set up and run. We have never experienced any locking or crashing with our system like some of the posts. I followed the guides and set up shortcuts on the server to start serving each program and then put the shorcuts into the startup folder so they would start automatically in case of a reboot(which never happens.) I also created a shortcut for designer and sesame client for each application on the server. I also set up shortcuts on each workstation for sesame client to each application. Everyone here has access to all functions of each application. We don't have a need to use security at this point but may add it later. I did increase the RAM on each workstation to at least 512MB before sesame was released - based on suggestions in the forum and the QuickAnswer newsletter.
I even set up a temporary server over the internet and that worked great - even though we currently have no need of that.
I am still making changes/improvements to our programs. I like(not quite love) Designer - especially where I can make changes while others are still working in the application. I can test and test and test before I reconcile. For a first generation program, Sesame is head and shoulders above the pack - with room to continue to improve until they will tower over the competition. The long wait was worth it for our company.
Sorry for the long windedness.
I mention the Sesame Multi-User Installation guide above and have not seen it available on the website. There is really not any new information in it that is not in the user guide and on the forum, but it is all in one place. Maybe it could be made available for download (or if it is available, maybe I could open my eyes.)