Server plug-in

The server plug-in (NetServer.vpg) should be installed in one VPT in the workgroup. It is used to collect individual project "chunks" submitted by different users and create combined project files for each user and the whole workgroup.

Copy the plug-in file into Plugins subfolder in VPT installation folder. Then restart VPT so it can load the new plug-in into memory.

The plug-in adds a new sub-menu to VPT and three toolbar buttons for some of its commands:

Before you can create any reports for a user or the workgroup, you need to process all newly submitted user projects, combine it and update existing project files. This can be done by selecting Process Client Projects command.

Note, that in order for VPT to do this, there should be no projects currently in VPT database (no projects should appear in Project Manager dialog). If you use the server VPT for time tracking as well, you need to back up the existing projects. You can do this easily by using the plug-in's Archive Local Projects command. This will copy all project files from Projects folder in VPT installation into a new LocalBackup folder that will be created automatically. You can restore all archived projects by using Restore Local Projects command.

Upon selecting Process Client Projects command VPT will load all projects stored in Projects subfolder of the shared network folder (for each user in turn), then combine project data for the same projects (project files with the same project name will be merged) and the resulting combined files will be moved to Data subfolder on the file server. After each user's folder is processed, all combined projects for each user are combined together to created combined stats for the whole workgroup. These combined projects are stored in the root of the Data folder.

In order to create a new project template that can be used by the workstations do the following:

1. Create a new project using Project>New... command in VPT.
2. Specify the project name, the applications that need to be tracked in the project and hourly billing rates.
3. Define any custom activity categories if needed.
4. When the project is created, select the project node in the Applications and open documents tree in VPT and choose Server>New Template From Project.

Please note that the new project that you create for a template must not contain any tracked data in it (documents or activities) otherwise they will appear in each user's project data and will be duplicated each time the user gets the template. Thus the tracked time will be wrong.

Also note that you cannot define projects that would have different billing rates for different users. If you need to do this, you need to create different project templates and have the users to use corresponding templates.

Now, after you combined project data for each user and the workgroup, you can review any user's or the workgroup's projects and create reports if needed. In order to do this, just load the user's projects (or the projects for the whole workgroup) by choosing Start>Load User Projects from the menu, then choose the user handle from the pop-up menu or choose Combined Totals in order to load the combined projects for the whole workgroup. Again, don't forget to archive any current local projects you might have before you load a user's projects.

After a user's projects are loaded, you can use Project Manager to see the projects the user worked on, and access each project's properties. You can also generate reports for any project as you would normally do it with regular local project.

You can also do some modifications to a user's project by loading it through Project>Open command and then editing its records/data. After you do the changes to a project (or projects) you can send them back to the file server by using Save User Projects command. Note that you cannot modify the combined projects for the workgroup directly because the combined projects are generated automatically each time you process user projects. You should modify user projects instead and then use Process Client Projects to re-generate workgroup totals.

Before you can start working with the server plug-in you need to specify the network path to the file server's shared folder where all the projects are stored. You can do this in Tools>Options dialog:

You also have a possibility to specify a project password to use by default for any project that is password protected.

You can protect the project templates with a password so the users cannot modify any of the data manually. In order to process those protected projects, VPT needs to know the password. You can specify the password in the Options dialog.