I am an admin in a small office where i am projecting 20-30 users wanting
business contact manager. Should I set up a central database where everyone
can have access. Or have users responsible for sharing their databases?
Thanks in advance for feedback. Or maybe both?
You should probably prototype this before committing to it.
BCM is designed to be very responsive to up five users on "typical"
hardware, so the clients hit the database continually so that a change
made by one user shows up on all the other users' machines within a
second. That's not a design that will scale up, so with 30 users,
you'll need a very fast server to have responsive clients.
The users' activity also matters. If they need to look up telephone
numbers randomly during the day, then performance shouldn't be a
problem. If, on the other hand, your users will be running reports--
i.e. fetching a lot of data from the database--that will have a
significant impact on performance.
If most of your users have their own personal sets of data, then they
should each set up their personal databases (default BCM behavior) and
export and send each other data when required. If your users need one
central database with all the data, then you will need a single server.
