PowerChurch Online hosted locally?

[joel]

I like the idea of PowerChurch being on line, and think it is a good thing. At the church I look after we have a PowerChurch server, and all of our users are in house. I do have one that wants to use the software remotely. So my question is will there be a version, or an add-on, that will enable me to host the server locally and let my one user access it remotely?

My current plan to make this happen is to put a VPN server that will give the user access to the network, and then write an HTA page to map a network drive and launch PowerChurch. I think that will work, my only concern is the speed at which the remote user is able to query the database, and launch the program since it is designed to work in a high bandwidth environment.

[Zaphod]

There is not a "hybrid" version of PowerChurch Online, but your VPN solution should work. You'll want to install the program on the remote computer though, and point it to the data. The executable file is about 12MB, and while it's not a problem to run it over a LAN, it doesn't work so well over the internet like that.

Set up PowerChurch on the server, and set up your mapping script. Install the program on the remote computer. Edit the desktop shortcut so that the "target" is the local executable, but the "start in" should be the pcplus10 directory on the server. That way, only data is going back and forth, not the actual program file.

Obviously, that'll only work when connected to the VPN, but it does work.

[joel]

Thanks for your help; I can’t wait till they install the server so I can test it all.