Maximum number of users on BCM

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
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Guest

Does anyone know how many users are allowed on the BCM update? I've been
looking on Microsoft's website, but like usual, the world's largest software
maker makes it hard to find a simple answer. I've got an office where I need
to have 7 different computers to have access to the BCM contacts. One of the
computers is giving me problems but I don't know if it's related to just that
computer or if I've maxed out the number of users allowed. Right now I've
only got 5 total but need to add two more. Help?
 
What limits the connections is not an absolute number of users, but how
busy they are. MSDE will only process five connections concurrently,
all the other requests are queued up. A single Outlook/BCM may use than
one connection--e.g. I know it is polling in the background for changes
in the database, while opening a form or switching folders will send
new requests to the database.

So, if your seven users are mainly using Outlook for email and only
looking up Business Contacts' phone numbers randomly during the work
day, they should all be able to connect to the same db. On the other
hand, if they are running reports, sorting folder views, and doing
other data intensive operations, then three connections may be
sluggish.

If you do need to use the database intensively, you could consider
putting the BCM database on a powerful (CPU and RAM) machine, and
upgrading to full sql server, which does not have the 5 connection
limit of MSDE. Note however that you need to be database and NT savvy
to do this successfully. Microsoft does not "support" such BCM
configurations, but if you search this newsgroup you'll find tips from
people who have moved the BCM db to a server successfully.
 
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