There may be times when you need to prevent other staff from accessing your Practice CS database. This will occur most often if you're doing some kind of maintenance on the database, such as updating projects, or at the end of your processing period when you're running your month-end reports.
Practice CS provides a way for you to lock the database so only selected staff can open it.
To lock the Practice CS database, select
Tools
then
Lock/Unlock Database
.
note
You'll need to be a member of the Administrator security group to access this window.
Lock Database tab
The
Lock Database
tab is where you can lock and unlock the database, indicate which staff can access the database while it is locked, and enter a message that other staff, who are not authorized to access the database when it is locked, will receive when they attempt to open Practice CS.
To lock the database, select the
Restrict access to Administrators
checkbox. This will lock the database to all staff members except those assigned to the Administrator security group.
To enable access by additional staff members while the database is locked, select the
Permit additional Staff to access a locked database
checkbox. Then select
More
at the end of the following line and select the additional staff members you'd like to grant access to the database while it's locked.
To display a message to staff who are not authorized to access the database while it's locked when they attempt to sign in, enter the message in the
Display this message to Staff who are denied access to a locked database
field.
Select
Apply
to lock the database with the restrictions you specified.
To unlock the database, unmark the
Restrict access to Administrators
checkbox.
Select
Apply
to unlock the database, then select
OK
to close the window.
Send Message tab
The
Send Message
tab lets you send a message to staff who are currently signed into Practice CS and sign out selected staff who haven’t responded to the request to sign out.
Select
Refresh
to ensure the list of
Staff currently logged in to the database
is up to date. You can do this as many times as necessary.
In the
Send a message
field, enter the message you want to send to staff asking them to sign out of Practice CS.
Do 1 of the following:
To send this message to all staff currently logged in (except administrators and additional staff you specified on the
Lock Database
tab), select
Send to All
.
To send this message to selected staff, select the staff members from the list and then select
Send to Selected
.
note
Messages may take up to a minute to be delivered to all recipients.
To sign out staff members who don’t respond to the message, select the staff members from the list and select
Logout selected
.
note
The sign out process may take up to a minute to be completed for all selected staff members.