Setting up a multi user system

Cassiopeia is based on FrontBase (http://www.frontbase.com), a modern SQL92 compliant relational database management system. FrontBase has a very small footprint and is basically maintenance free. The few admin tasks you should know about are outlined in the following documents.

• Account Management
• Central Database
• License Management
• Scheduling Backups

Having a relational database underneath automatically provides everything needed for a fully-equipped document management and multi-user scientific wordprocessing system for co-editing in a workgroup. The documents above describe how to setup a central database on a remote host and how to configure the Cassiopeia clients to connect to the remote database instead of the local one. This allows Cassiopeia users to share documents, books, bib entries etc. with colleagues without further ado. The head of a workgroup could e.g. create/setup a book as outlined in Books and have its colleagues contribute sections for this book as outlined in Documents. No data synchronisation or document consolidation is necessary whatsoever. The owner of the book can add references to sections that are still being worked on by colleagues to a book anytime and generate LaTeX from time to time to see the current state of the co-operative work in PDF form.

Authors of scientific papers often need to cite external publications. This is done with bibliography links - references to entries in a common bibliography repository stored in the central database - in Cassiopeia. However, imagine you or a colleague of yours has written a document with the proof of a thesis you would like to reference in your current work. Since all documents are stored in a central database you have immediate access to the work of your colleague as long as enough access privileges have been granted. You do not want to copy the proof into your document (avoid redundance) but instead prefer to insert a reference of the form "As has been shown in ... the ..." to the document of your colleague. When it comes to printing you can decide whether this referenced work is to be included in the main matter, in the appendix or not at all as explained in Links and Bibliography. Sections can be referenced by any number of other documents and books. Imagine an error is found in the proof and corrected. Since you have chosen not to copy the proof but only referenced it in your work all you might have to do is to regenerate LaTeX to get this fix included into your pending publication.

If you have trouble setting up a multi-user environment following the instructions given in the above guides do not hesitate to contact us at support@advanced-science.com. We will be happy to assist you in getting everything setup correctly.