Network Considerations and System Specifications

This document describes LAB TRACKER^™ HIV running on native Visual FoxPro tables from a file server. LAB TRACKER^™ HIV is written for Windows XP/2000/98. The network can be Novell or Windows XP/2000/98. Please see the following section in this document titled LAB TRACKER^™ HIV System Specifications for details on server and client requirements.

FoxPro database capacity and table size can easily manage systems containing more than 100K patients. For example, a typical system containing 10,000 patients will utilize only 500 - 1000 MB, including all system programs files and patient data.

It is possible to run LAB TRACKER^™ HIV with SQL Server as a backend. This more robust solution greatly decreases the amount of network traffic, but adds complexity of administering SQL Server and buying the license for SQL Server. If you are interested in this option, please contact your LAB TRACKER^™ HIV software sales representative for more information.

LAB TRACKER^™ can also run on a Terminal Server platform. A special Setup program is required to install the Terminal Server functionality. If you are interested in running in a Terminal Server environment, please contact Customer Support for additional programs.

For small systems, five or fewer users, with a network devoted only to LAB TRACKER, a Windows 98 server running LAB TRACKER^™ HIV in File Server mode is acceptable. In this case, the client workstations do the data access and the server acts exclusively as the file server. This option generates an increased amount of network traffic, but requires less system maintenance.

The advantage of using FoxPro tables as the repository of all data is the compatibility with virtually every LAN and Server installation, and the ease of installation and support. LAB TRACKER^™ HIV will function properly on an existing LAN and server, ONLY if the existing server load is not near capacity; e.g. file sharing only. However, if the existing server is near computing capacity, it is HIGHLY recommended to install a server devoted to LAB TRACKER.

The majority of LAB TRACKER^™ HIV processing is done on the client. The system data is stored on the server, which acts as the server part of file server. All of the data is stored in FoxPro tables. In order to minimize network traffic, LAB TRACKER^™ HIV creates temporary files on the local hard-drive of the user at system startup and as the user accesses LAB TRACKER. If you are planning to import data from an HL7 interface, a dedicated server is required.

Installation does not require setting up a specific SQL Server, such as Oracle or SQL Server, and does not require any specific network OS or communications protocol. FoxPro does require Windows 2000 or Windows XP on the server for all but the smallest of systems. LAB TRACKER^™ HIV can be run with SQL Server as a backend in a truly Client-Server environment. If your installation requires this, please contact Customer Support for purchase information. This requires the necessary SQL Server licenses as well as the LAB TRACKER^™ HIV SQL Server license.