My previous post dated Jan 27, 2009 describes how to set-up Donor Manager to run on a Home Network under Windows XP. But I recently upgraded both our Laptop and Desktop comupters to run under Windows 7 Pro (64 bit), and this procedure no longer works. However, using the following steps, I was able to get Donor Manager to run with a synchronized database on both the laptop and on the desktop. Here is what I did:
1 - Installed Dropbox (see
http://www.dropbox.com) on both the desktop and the laptop.
2 - Created a dropbox folder on the desktop called
Donor5 that I configured to share with the laptop
3 - Installed Donor Manager on the desktop into the
Donor5 shared dropbox folder on the desktop
4 - Installed Donor Manager on the laptop into the
Donor5 shared dropbox folder on the laptop.
Now I can run Donor Manager on either the desktop or the laptop (
but not both at the same time) and the DM database will remain synchronized. This installation is also better that the previous one under Windows XP because in that setup, the Donor Manager program was only installed on the desktop, so when we had the laptop away from our home network, the Donor Manager program was not available. Now we can use the laptop, with Donor Manager installed on it when we are away from our home network, and have full access the the program and the database. If we make any changes to the database on either computer, those changes are synchronized with the other computer through Dropbox.