shared front end

[Libre]

From reading the threads on split DBs, it seems that the standard practice is to have the BE on a shared network drive and each client has their own FE. I have a different set-up.
Is there anything wrong with having 1 single front end on a network Shared drive, and having the user's share it? Then each client only needs a shortcut to the front end (and of course MS Access installed on their local machine). But that way, you only need to maintain and update one front end instead of multiple instances of the front end.
This is how I have it set up at work - but there is only myself and 1 other user. But it works fine that way - I'm running an mdb and she's running an mde, both connected to the same BE. Both the FE's and the BE are on parallel folders under a parent folder on a network drive.
I'm the db admin btw, and only of this application. And it's not my main job there.
Thanks for your comments.

 

[John Big Booty]

This post by Bob Larson may help you decide if it's a good idea to have a shared front end or not

 

[khodr]

I have a database running on the server used by 15 users, at the begging I thought I can make one frontend and it should work fine but the first running day was so crazy as full of errors exactly as what Bob said, now I just have a folder on each user pc all I need after modifying my front end is just give them an ACCDE file and ask them to place on that folder or I can go via network and do it myself and for the 15 of them it takes 3 minutes
Hope my post was useful to you

 

[Libre]

Ah. Each user can set up front end preferences the way they want, cosmetically (location of menus, toolbars - not much else with an mde file) so if everybody is using one front end there would be contention between the dll preference files.
This makes sense. Since I only have 1 user on the front end (besides myself) I don't run into the problem, but if I had any more, there would be contention.
Okay - thanks for explanation.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

There is more than just contention for the forms and reports. If you have any temporary tables in the FE, you compete for table content. Having private temp tables to accelerate queries makes the database responsive even on a sluggish network. But if the FE is shared, you have to tag each user's contribution to the temp tables and only erase their part. Can you say nightmare? Sharing the FE permeates the application. Having done it the wrong way more than once (due to my stubborn streak), I now know I will NEVER go back to shared FE.

 

[Libre]

And when I was a kid they always told me it's good to share.
I wonder what other nonsense they filled my head with.


Now that you've brought it up, what are temporary tables?
I mean, I can sort of understand what they are by the name.
But other than rare instances where I have kind of a "holding table" for let's say data transfers to an external database, I never really thought about using them.

Can you please explain more about them -why and when you would use temp tables?
Thx