Synchronising actinic installs

[storerat]

Hi
I have manged to get a a site up and running by installing, uploading and processing orders from one machine.

Now, thinking about installing actinic catalogue (v7) on a second desktop so that more than one person can process orders from the site (and to give redundancy in case one of the machines dies unexpectedly).

Does anyone have any thoughts about best practice? I foresee a problem keeping the databases synchronised unless one install is automatically the 'master'. At least I haven't found this mentioned in the online docs - maybe I've missed it.

For example; for my email, only one machine ever deletes mails from the server, this means I always have a full record of emails received on one of our machines.
Is it possible to do this kind of thing with actinic orders?

I'm a bit puzzled as to how we keep track of outstanding orders and whether they are processed or not if we start using a second machine - if anyone can give me some pointers on this, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[Bruce]

Hi,

In order to make it simple to move an entire store from one installation of Actinic to another, there is a built in 'snapshot' feature. A snapshot saves all relevant files and settings into one easily portable file. These 'site files' use an extension of *.acd.

To take a backup of a site go to 'File | Snapshot | Export Site'. This will then guide you through a wizard to help you save all the relevant settings for your currently active site into one file. This can then be implemented onto a second machine by going to 'File | Snapshot | Import Site' on the second machine.

Uploading on One Machine and Downloading on Another

Through checking either one of the 'Allow on this PC' options (under 'Business Settings | Options') you can specify whether a particular machine is used just for 'Catalog Maintenance' or just for 'Order Processing'. This means that one PC can just be used to maintain and upload a store to the web site whilst the other machine can be used solely for order processing from that catalogue.
To permanently disable the ability to upload from a machine that is simply processing the orders, remove all the templates from the system (all files of the form Act_*.html)

Other Actinic users can also post here to better explain as to how you manage your stores that are split over two seperate computers and as to what best practices you use in your case scenario's.

Kind regards,

[storerat]

Thanks Bruce.

What is really puzzling me is synchronising of store records when two machines are used to download orders. If machine1 downloads orderX at 11:00 and machine2 downloads orderY at 11:05, doesn't that mean that the next time machine1 attempts to download orders, it will not see OrderY?

I'm trying to work out how to keep a global record of orders when using 2 machines to download orders.

Cheers

K

[Bruce]

Hi,

That will be an issue in more ways than one. I would suggest using one machine to upload and one to download and making snapshots or Database back-up's on a regular basis and saving it to a CD or a remote location to ensure redundancy. You could download from both machines if the security keys on both match each other, the wat forward from there will be to periodically merge both Databases selecting the update option so that you have all the necessary data available, Please note that this is really not advisable as there are all possibilities of you loosing data in the process.

Kind regards,