Space System Engineers Work in Collaborative Community Collaboration means working together to achieve a common goal whether in business, scientific research or another field. Often the ability for geographically distributed organizations to collaborate is affected by distance and time, and complicated by the inability to communicate data within the collaboration community. In the example below, FileMaker Pro enhanced with SyncDeK's robust synchronization capabilities solved this common yet very costly problem. The Challenge: Multi-national, Multi-company Data Review Fifty engineers from five companies on three different continents collaborate to design and build prototype space systems hardware. During a single design phase, each engineer may author, distribute, review and comment on hundreds of design documents. Managing the process of removing duplicates, writing and tracking responses and coordinating the flood of documents was as great a challenge as the hardware review itself. Throughout the process, additional meetings of engineers from all five companies were required to facilitate communication and collaboration. Costs were high, cultural differences became an issue, personalities flared and deadlines were missed. In addition, each company wanted to control the data so that it was secure and certain proprietary data was only shared with certain other users. The Solution: Secure, User-Controlled Synchronization of Design Data The first step was to create a Review Form database in FileMaker Pro to enable more structured control of the review data. SyncDeK was integrated into the system to allow the distribution of the system to engineers at each company. As the engineers are often on the road with various Internet access capabilities, a single-user copy of the database is deployed on each individual's laptop (and/or desktop). SyncDeK's flexible conditional sharing capabilities protect proprietary data from leaking from one company to another, routing appropriate information to the right members of the collaborative team and streamlining decisions. Using SyncDeK's data transmission between nodes, individual entries into the system are exchanged transparently using SyncDeK Server with data encryption, and thereby synchronized with all 49 other nodes. Product: Community Starter Kit Proven Benefits