General: Jet 4.0 Replication

     Jet 4.0 Replication has a lot of exciting new features which provide very compelling reasons to upgrade the applications using Jet 3.x or Jet 3.5x Replication.

• Removes "Data Errors" from the product, so that only conflicts exist, all of which can be deleted and thus you are never left with data errors that cannot be resolved.

• Allows you to do tracking at the column level instead of the row level so that if multiple people edit the same record but do not edit the same columns, you can keep from having a conflict (you can also keep row-level tracking if your app needs it).

• Reports conflicts at ALL replicas instead of just the losing one, which allows you to create conflict management schemes that are centralized if you like. You will never lose conflicts like you could in prior versions.

• Better internet synchronization that allows you to work through firewalls and makes a lot of the previously hardcoded params like timeouts modifyable so you can make your app more robust.

• Better conflict management, which works on a priority basis instead of the lame "most updated" scheme. Its so cool that I do mind losing the laugh I used to get telling people about the old scheme at conferences. :-)

• Better conflict tracking, with lots of new fields to help you better understand why the conflict happened, who it was with, and how to fix it! This means better custom resolvers!

• Child conflicts! A good example is if you do a dupe primary key of two customers. There are no more errors, so what Jet does is delete one of the customers and puts them in a conflict table. But what if they had Orders or OrderDetails? No problem, they are deleted too.... but by using the new conflict tracking, you can tell that these conflicts are "children" of the original conflict, so you can automate resolution based on what you do with the main conflict in Customers, or have some sort of custom logic, or anything!

• The TSI Synchronizer has a 4.0 version that is wonderful (the 3.52 version was written after the 4.0 one), and it will be out as soon as Office 2000 hits the streets (no, I do not know when this is)... so Replication Manager is not something you need any more!

    Well, thats enough for now. If you are not excited by any of the above items, it is clear you have never used Jet 3.x or 3.5x replicaton. These new features alone make for a very compelling upgrade for apps that use replication.