Hello,
I have a query relating to Acrobat Professional Version 8. We have installed 5 licenced copies on 5 networked desktops in a call centre.
Each day hundreds of emails containing pdfs are automatically opened and the "request form.pdf" is saved sequentially to a network server folder for the call staff to respond to.
Call centre staff then open the pdf from the network server folder, respond to the enquiry and create a "response.pdf" which is then combined to the initial "request form .pdf".
This combined "request form .pdf" is then emailed back to the client. Clear so far?.
My dilemma is how do I prevent the same "request form.pdf" from being opened up by different call centre operators? In MS Word or Excel, if the document is opened and another user tries to open it, a dialogue box warns that another user is working on the same document.
Can you assist please?
Here's why - when Word / Excel open a file is it flagged by the network OS as open for Read/Write. That means that the next hits on the file by someone else will have to open them in Read-Only mode. When the first person closes the file, the flags are set to 'not in use'. The second person can then re-open the file to get read/write capabilities. This provides an extremely rudimentary record-locking mechanism provided for you by the network operating system.
Acrobat, on the otherhand, works a bit differently. It opens the file in Read/Write, but allows subsequent opens to be in Read/Write - Allowing several folks to open the file at the same time. You don't notice this until you try to save the file - both machines will receive a 'read-only' message, requiring them to save it to a new file name to avoid a overwrite collision.
Solutions to this -- You could investigate the use of Version Cue as a small scale version control tool. This may increase your workflow overhead to some extent.
Second, more complicated, would be to use a database that supports full record locking and store the PDFs as BLOB data types inside the database. There are two modifications necessary to your workflow. 1) The automated PDF detatch populates the PDF into the database. Then (part 2) You build a small front-end tool that assigns the work. A simple round-robbin scheduler is all that's needed, with each rep loging into the scheduler to receive work. This tool also be the entrypoint into the physical files - that way all access goes through the database - allowing for full logging and access control and metrics monitoring.
Someone may have already built something such as this - Google may help you there.
There may be other solutions out there, but the above are two you may want to investigate.
Hope this helps. Thanks.
Douglas Hanna is a member of the Production Print Technology team at Aon.
www.aonhewitt.com