Project Sharing & Synchronization in BO 4.0 IDT

[Sujit]

     BO 4.0 IDT provides you with a new feature of Project Sharing and Synchronization of the Shared Project, to enable working on a Universe Designing Project in collobration or as a team. I belive this is a replacement for the Shared Connection option, present in the earlier versions of BO - used for Sharing of resources or Joint development of resources.

Shared Project

     A shared Project is the one whose resources are shared across with other designers. A Local Project can be converted into a Shared Project from the given menu options.

     Once a Local Project is shared, the Shared Project stored in the Repository will have the same name as the Local Project.  You have an option to rename the Shared Project to any name you want. However, the Name of a Shared Project has to be unique in the Repository.

Once the Projects are shared, the Projects with be listed in the Shared Project view to indicate that it is a Shared Project.

     If a Project is shared by other Designer, and if it’s still not part of your Local Project. You can synchronize the Shared Project from Project Synchronization view to have a copy of the Project on your Local machine.

     Overwriting of a Project resource is avoided by a locking mechanism. Whenever a Designer initiates working on a resource, he has the option to lock the resource.  The lock thus prevents any other Designer from making changes to the same resource simultaneously.

Project Synchronization

Project Synchronization as the name suggest brings both the Projects (from Repository and on Local) at the same level of development stage and helps your manage it.

Project Synchronization view has two parts,

Shared Project pane, list down all the resources from server which are available for Sharing

     Synchronization Status, lists down the status of all the resources from the server as well as locally i.e. if the resource is added, modified, deleted etc. If the resources are changed on the Server, it gives you an option to Synchronize the local copy with the server, or vice versa.

My articles intend to capture my understanding of the new features of BO 4.0 IDT. Please feel free to add your comments / understanding, experiences about the feature or tool.