Several beta testers and some potential purchasers have already asked, “Can more than one person use LIDA at the same time?”
The short answer is YES. But it comes with a couple of yellow flags, and some considerations.
The first thing to consider is “WHO is going to be using LIDA?“
We have two principal target users of LIDA: Music Directors, and Music Librarians and their librarian staffs.(1) Music Directors. These are the people who look to their music libraries to decide what to program on their upcoming concerts, the people who need to ask the kinds of questions LIDA is built to answer, such as “What patriotic tunes do we have that we haven’t played in the last 3 years?”
(2) Music Librarians. These are the organizational staff members who are in charge of filing the music, finding it when needed, distributing it to the musicians, collecting it after a performance, and refiling it. They are usually the main people charged with keeping the data about the library.
There could be several other types of people who would want to use LIDA, but these are the principal two.
The next thing to consider is “Where will these users be located?“
Professional music organizations and churches can have offices where the users can be expected to be, and these office complexes can have LANs and WiFi communication. But this is not the case for most organizations, especially those with volunteer staffs. For many others, those who need to use LIDA can be at their day job, at home, or sitting in a Starbucks 600 miles away.So the answer to this consideration is that the data file needs to be in the cloud.
We have already tested this concept, and it works. Each computer you want to have access to your data needs to have a Dropbox or other free cloud storage account, with a service that allows you to set up a synchronized folder on your computer.
What this means is that if you put a file into a Dropbox-synchronized folder on your computer, that file is very quickly synchronized to (copied to) the same folder on the cloud server. If you then share that cloud folder with another computer, and they add it to their synchronized folders, then what happens is when user A makes a change to LIDA, the change is written to the data file in the synchronized folder. That file is then quickly uploaded to the cloud, and user B, who is also synchronized to that cloud file then receives those updates on their computer and can see them.I know, this is not as ideal a solution as a web-based application, but it does work, and it allows us to have the powerful LIDA application up and running in a fraction of the time it would take to build a web app that does the same thing.
The Yellow Flags.
First, there will be some delay between when a user posts a change to LIDA and another user can (synchronize to and) see the changes. However, unless time is critical, this shouldn’t be an issue, and if it is, there are always phone calls and text messages. Second, you could corrupt your data if two different people work on changes to LIDA at the same time. However, changes means someone is adding, editing, or deleting records in LIDA, and usually, that should be only the librarian who is doing this. We anticipate the Music Director will only be browsing and querying the database, which will not endanger the data at all.In summary, having multiple users access LIDA simultaneously is possible, it simply takes a bit of maneuvering.
Teaser: After LIDA is operational and fully tuned and tweaked – which might take a couple of years – we plan to begin migrating to LIDA-Generation2 as a web app.