• Background
• CLASS Project
• CLASS Staff
• General Insights
• Questions & Considerations
• Content
• Development Teams
• Content Acquisition
• Assessment & Grading
• Design
• Introduction
• Modeling
• Presentation
• Interactivity
• Navigation
• Assessments
• National Standards
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• Courses
• Features
• Courses
• Copyrights
• Technology
• Building a Course
• See and Say
• There are Limits!
• Influence and Change
• CLASS Courses
• Content
• Extras Designed
• Extras Linked
• Class Assessments
• A Bit of Dreamweaver
• Proofing
• Graphics
• MOUs
• Detailing Treatment
• Course Credits
• CLASS Style
• Publications

To Write or Over-write

The CLASS™ Project, with production at Nebraska Educational Telecommunication (NET) and development in another building at the Division of Continuing Studies (DCS), required an organized method of working with course files. Early in the Project it was not an issue because there were few staff members. As the staff number grew, so did the confusion of file management. As luck would have it, Dreamweaver™ came out with a file management system that worked for the Project – once the staff determined the process.

Following is a humorous explanation that helped to explain the system.

Many of us in the bowels of DCS (A.K.A. "the garden level") are having issues with this check in/check out and "do you want to overwrite your local" or "do you want to overwrite your remote" messages. Many of you may have figured this out already but I am an idiot so only figured it out today. If you do not have this problem or know how to avoid it then disregard this message and pretend that I (not the message) do not exist (it works for my wife ?). What I have found that seemed to clear things up for me is the following:

It does not matter which side you click on to open a file, both do the same thing. When you double click to open, it is the same as "check out" and basically pulls a file off the remote server and downloads it to your computer. Then you make your fancy smancy changes and save them. You just saved the new copy to your local only. Save does not save the changes to the remote no matter what side (remote or local) you opened it up on. To save it to the remote you must check it in, which automatically overwrites the file already on the remote.

Let's say you check out a file, make some changes and close it without checking it in because you want to look at it again soon. If you try to open it again by clicking on the remote side you will get a message saying, "do you wish to overwrite your local copy." You think that they are the same but they are not. The local has the changes that you had saved but the remote still has the old one since you did not "check in" the file. If you made changes, saved them, closed the file, and opened it from your local you would not get this message because you are opening the most current document from your local and it is already checked out in your name.

To avoid this confusion of the overwrite messages and knowing whether to open from the remote or local you have two options:
1. Always check something back in after making changes and check it out again if you want to view it again.

2. Rather than closing the file and leaving it checked out you can just minimize the file and maximize it to view it again. That way you don't have to check it in and you don't have to totally reopen the file and wonder whether or not to open it from the remote or local.

If that does not make sense you should feel good about yourself that you probably already knew what was going on. If it does make sense then I'm sorry but you're as slow as I am and I'm dragging you down with me.

p.s. the term bowels of DCS. was coined from a friendly UNL professor and is not original material from the author of this fine piece of literature

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