[OmniCert]

Hey all,

my company works with 5 Mac computers, all of the employees are heavy users and are working on the same OF database, which is stored on our macminiserver. (No syncing to mobile devices by the way) Sometimes fresh entries tend to get "lost", they dissappear from the screen. I guess this is due to syncing?

My question is, what will happen in September, when 6 more people will be working on the database? Will it still be possible to use OmniFocus, or is there a server version?

OF is very important for our company, we organise our whole task management with OF.


Thanks for your answers,

Thorsten

[Brian]

OmniFocus 1.x is designed around a single-user workflow. It's possible on a theoretical/technical level to do something like this, but in practice, 11 folks working on the app simultaneously behave differently than one person with 11 devices.

(The more simultaneous users you add, the more likely it becomes that 2 or more people edit the same item between syncs. If it's just one person using a bunch of different devices round-robin style, that doesn't happen as much.)

When two folks that are between syncs edit the same item in the database, it's called a "sync conflict"; OmniFocus resolves them by letting the edit that occurred later trump the earlier one.

(We resolve conflicts this way in order to keep sync times acceptably fast on iOS devices. Sorting out the overlapping changes would make sync take longer than customers have told us they want to wait.)

I've seen smaller groups make something like this work by being careful to sync before and after any changes they make in the database; with 11 folks, though, I'm not sure how successful that would be.

This all said, support for team-based workflows is something we're considering for future versions of the app. :-)