real time monitoring access and usage?

[sunnyhanda]

Hello all
my question is bit tricky, at least for me.
I work in Indian railways as System Analyst and recently we have been having huge request on one issue which i will be explaining with example.

suppose we have two office
office -A in Delhi (user1)
office -B in Bombay (user2)
different between these offices is about 500km.

both user 1 and user 2 working on same word or excel file which is located on network share. as we all know if user 1 open that particular file then it will be read-only for user2 so is there any way that we use some sort of utility or technology thorough which both user1 & user2 can actually work together & can see instant changes done regardless any user 1or2.
Reason user1 & user2 both working on project which involves continues changes on values in excel files and they both need to be on phone & doing work together to create those values.
google docx is a good example but we can not use it due the privacy issue for company data.
what can be done?
we want some sort of real time access

 

[jspears80]

I'm sure there are better solutions out there but I do something similar at work.

My coworker and I use VMware server with Windows XP loaded. We both can access the VM at the same time and see what the other is doing. This would just involve downloading the free version of Vmware server and installing windows on it with Office.

This way anybody (you allow) on the network can access this VM (computer) and you can literally see the mouse moving while the other person is using it.

Not the cleanest solution but without doing any additional research that is one way to do it.

TLDR; Two users can simultaneously access a single user account on VMware server.

 

[gamblingman]

I'm not aware of any way to have two people in different locations work on the same file. Even if it could be setup as database program, it would be a disaster for the program keeping everything working correctly. Is there some reason why both people need to use it at the exact same time?

If would work better if they used the same file saved on the server, and each person was delegated time to use the file. But even with that you could run into problems. Why is it that they cant use separate files and do a reconciliation once a month or so?