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As businesses grow from one or two employees to many, they need the ability to
easily and successfully work as a team or in multiple teams.
In client/server applications, business resources, such as data and files, are kept on a central
‘server’ computer. Users work in collaboration by sharing these resources in a secure and controlled manner
through ‘client’ programs running on their individual workstations.
Most workflow systems are client/server applications.
Working from the same central data allows users to view each other's changes,
divide workloads and track work progress. Client/server solutions allow for
data to be 'locked' by a single user during editing so that users do not
accidentally save over one another's changes.
In the past, client/server applications required huge mainframe computers, but today most desktop computers
are powerful enough to act as servers. Multiple computers can be seamlessly joined together to act as a single
server using a technology called 'clustering'. As the number of users and database size grows,
additional computers are added to the server cluster, allowing for infinite scalability.
Client/server applications used to be very expensive and hard to implement.
Over the last decade, Microsoft has built a solid client/server foundation
into all Windows operating systems and software packages.
If you use Windows, your business has the ability to run client/server applications.
By extending and building upon this foundation, we are able to rapidly build
reliable, powerful and secure enterprise applications.
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