MicroPAVER™ Network Installation

 

MicroPAVER™ 5 is not a networked application; it is designed for use on a single workstation. If you must install the system in a networked environment, there are only two meaningful alternatives:

 

Network the pavement databases and restrict editing

 

Install PAVER on each networked workstation that will have access to the networked pavement databases. Put the shared pavement databases on the network server, and map a drive on each workstation to provide access to the networked database. Each user can then access the shared pavement database using File/Open from the main PAVER desktop menu.

 

With this approach, each workstation has its own copy of system tables but is accessing a shared pavement database. This creates two potential problems which must be resolved by careful management.

  1. Since PAVER does not support multi-user access, conflicts could arise if different users are editing the pavement data at the same time. For this reason, you must establish a process whereby editing the pavement data (entering inventory, inspections and work) is restricted to one of the networked workstations. This will preclude multiple simultaneous edits.
  2. Since this configuration creates multiple copies of the system tables, different workstations could produce different results for the same pavement data based on different system table usage. For this reason, you must establish a process whereby edits to the system tables are manually propagated (via import/export) to the other workstations.

With these two restrictions, users on the network can access a networked pavement database.

Use a Terminal Services or Citrix Server

 

You can install MicroPAVER on a Terminal Services or Citrix server and allow users to access the common MicroPAVER install. However, since PAVER does not support multiple user access to common data, you must enforce rules like those above:

  1. Two users cannot edit the same pavement data at the same time. You can configure your server so that different users can only see different pavement databases, or you must enforce by process that only one user is allowed to edit the pavement data.
  2. Two users cannot edit the system tables at the same time. Here you have no configuration option; you must enforce a process that only one user is able to edit system table data.

With these two restrictions, users can access a common PAVER install on the Terminal Services/Citrix server.

 

Another alternative is to have multiple PAVER installs on the server, and give each user their own system tables and pavement data. In this case, there need be no process restrictions because you are giving each user their own databases.