I recently joined an organization that has Filemaker Pro 5. They needed a re-instalation of one of their 'licences' on a replacement computer and now, noone can use file maker in 'multi user mode'. I have absolutely zero knowledge of file maker other than the facat that it is a database application and the version in this office is waaay out of date. They have no money to upgrade so I have to deal with this.

How do I fix this so that hey can open the same database concurently? What could I have done to stop this from working? All I did was install FileMaker on a new computer.

Thanks.

Yes, way out of date, but it's still out there. Filemaker shares a file in one of two ways. The first, is peer-to-peer. The file is on one workstation and accessed using Open Remote on other workstations. The file must be set to multi-user. The second is to host the file on a dedicated workstation running Filemaker Server software.

So, where is the file?

Each user needs their own serial number. You could try uninstalling and then re-install with a different serial number.

The file is on a file server. Is there a special way to save as in order to make it multi user? Each file maker program has been able to access files in multi user mode before so i dont think there is a problem with serial numbers.

If the file is shared on a file server using OS file sharing (rather than hosted by FileMaker Server), and multiple people are opening that file, it will get corrupted.

Multi-user with FileMaker means one FileMaker client (or FM Server) hosts the file, i.e. if you're not using FM Server the first person to open the file becomes the host. Additional users must open the file using FileMaker's "Open Remote" command.

The file should reside on the machine of the FileMaker client that is hosting the file, not on a file server.

See FMI KB Article 5373

The article references FileMaker 9. We have FileMaker5. Is this still applicable?

Good link, here's another:

http://help.filemaker.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7616/kw/peer%20to%20peer/related/1

And yes, it does apply to version 5 as well.