[Kriley]

I have an assistant that is responsible for filtering my email and maintaining my task and projects lists. How can she edit my OF files at the same time I am using it?

[pvonk]

OF is not a multiuser app.

[whpalmer4]

To expand upon pvonk's answer a bit:

OF is not designed to be used as groupware. That doesn't mean you can't do it, but there are some cases that can bite you if you aren't careful. Essentially, OmniFocus assumes that only one person at a time will be editing any given item (you won't be making simultaneous changes on two different Macs, or on a Mac and an iPhone, etc.) If that assumption is violated, the earlier change will be silently discarded. What this means is if you and your assistant happen to edit the same action and then sync, one of those changes will vanish. That could be pretty serious if you were making some notes, and the assistant was updating the due date; if your change came second, you'd get your notes, but no one would notice that the due date change didn't stick. I believe that there are some more subtle cases as well where you might lose changes to the ordering of actions, etc.

So, if you can make sure that neither of you is making changes at the same time to the same things, it should work. That may not be very practical, or it may be completely reasonable.

From a licensing standpoint, you'll need to own two copies of OmniFocus to be in compliance, as the license allows for one person to use it on a number of computers, or a number of people to use it on the same computer. You would presumably have two people and two computers. To clarify, I'm speaking of the license for a copy bought directly from Omni; if you buy through the App Store the licensing is different, but I only know that it is different, not how it differs.

[ngobiyane]

Dear Kriley,

from my experience working with multiple people on one OF database does work fine.

We had up to 9 people working on one and the same database with nearly 60,000 single tasks. This was clearly the limit, though: tasks started to disappear, the database slowed down painfully and it wasn´t much fun either.

Now we´re sharing one database with groups of 2-4 each, and it´s all good.

BTW: I have two personal assistants, and quite a few projects going on. It works fine for me. We´re using the OF sync server, but also used our own company file server before. OmniSyncServer seemed safer to me.

Enjoy!

[ngobiyane]

Additional Info:

When working in a group environment we used the "contexts" to name the team members. Our contexts then where "Steve", "Linda", "James" ...

I know it was a workaround, but it kept us going.