You’ve edited your company’s Master Quick Bid database(adding/deleting/changing Items, Contacts, and other Master records), and now you want to distribute that updated database’s content to all your users.
Suggestions
Every company is going to handle this situation a bit differently, but we'd like to offer you some suggestions for standardizing the Master data your user's use to build estimates.
Create a Company Master Quick Bid database
Using Quick Bid, place a copy of your Master database someplace on your network and make all your edits to that database.
Close Quick Bid,
In Windows Explorer, rename the database (the mdb file) to "Company Master <Year>"
Next, right-click on the database and select Properties.
Set the file to "Read Only".
The next time you need to make updates, you'll do it in this Company Master. Just be sure to remove the Read Only flag before you open the
database in Quick Bid.
Have Users Synchronize to that Company Master
Follow these instructions for opening that Company Master: Finding an Access-type Database (that is not stored in the Default database location)
Users will see the following error message, advise them to click Yes:
Once open, have the user follow the instructions in this article to synchronize this Company Master with their individual, local database: Database Maintenance - Synchronizing Databases - be sure the Company Master is the Source and their local database is the Destination.
Once the sync'ing is done, they will have an updated database.
A few things to note:
- Synchronization never removes records from the Destination database, it only adds new records and updates existing.
- Synchronization never updates existing Bid pricing - once an Item (Material or Labor) is used in a Bid, a copy of that Item is made unique to that Bid so it is isolated from changes in other Bids or the Masters.
- You can have them re-synchronize with the Company Master any time you make changes.
- Because they've already opened the Company Master database, they'll have ready access to it next time you want to roll-out updates.
- Users should close the Company Master database so they don't get the Read Only error every time they open Quick Bid.
Congratulations
That's it! This is the last article of the Quick Bid User Guide - be sure to check out the other Quick Bid resources on the Product Information and Downloads Page.
Multiple Concurrent Users in an SQL Databases (Database Sharing)