Hi All,

I've come in as a developer in the middle of a database project in
Access 2003 which the design spec describes as using "replication by
email."  I've gone through and read all the MS faqs, the TSI material,
david fenton's site, etc, it would seem that zipping up and emailing
replicas around is a Bad Idea. I'm now searching for alternatives...

The database will be used in 4 field sites of different organisations
with intermittent connections to the internet. The "central" site has
no internet server nor a VPN. I'm exploring several options:

1) Mapping an FTP site a drive letter using Novell NetDrive and
configuring the clients for indirect synchronization. This is
problematic because I think at least one of the organisations have IT
policies that won't allow the install of NetDrive... It also seems
woefully complex.

2) Internet synchronization using a hosted IIS server. Don't know if
this is possible given that I won't be able to run the synchronizer on
the server. But surely there must be a way to get the clients to
upload msg files, for the hub database (running on my PC) to check in
periodically with the FTP folder, and leave results?

3) Rolling my own synchronizer that creates simple xml "msg" files
that encapsulate changes that can be emailed to the hub database.
Anyway to get jet to produce these msg files for me?

Any thoughts on which of these is the most viable?

Alex