Upgrade StorageSome questions from a new user
Hello,
I'm an employee at a large consulting firm that currently does not use a referencing software. It's driving me nuts so I'm attempting to pitch a case to our director to transition to Zotero. But before I do, I have a few questions I hope someone can help with.
1. We are a large company and have people writing reports constantly. Therefore we would have people accessing the zotero library simultaneously at all times. Will this cause any problems with the sync function?
2. If the above situation is OK, what would be the best course of action for handling our library. Each staff member has their own laptop so I would assume they would also need a local llibrary file. However we would want the Zotero Storage library to be the master copy. How can this be set up to ensure there are no conflicts. Alternatively, is there any way to just access the Zotero Storage library without the need of a local file? If so, can that be accessed simultaneously by several users?
I apologise if these are simple questions, I'm just wanting to be 100% sure before I pitch my case. It will unfortunately invovle gettting 100+ people to change their current workflow so I need to be certain it's a good idea. Thanks for the help!
I'm an employee at a large consulting firm that currently does not use a referencing software. It's driving me nuts so I'm attempting to pitch a case to our director to transition to Zotero. But before I do, I have a few questions I hope someone can help with.
1. We are a large company and have people writing reports constantly. Therefore we would have people accessing the zotero library simultaneously at all times. Will this cause any problems with the sync function?
2. If the above situation is OK, what would be the best course of action for handling our library. Each staff member has their own laptop so I would assume they would also need a local llibrary file. However we would want the Zotero Storage library to be the master copy. How can this be set up to ensure there are no conflicts. Alternatively, is there any way to just access the Zotero Storage library without the need of a local file? If so, can that be accessed simultaneously by several users?
I apologise if these are simple questions, I'm just wanting to be 100% sure before I pitch my case. It will unfortunately invovle gettting 100+ people to change their current workflow so I need to be certain it's a good idea. Thanks for the help!
1.
- On a technical level accessing a library with even hundreds of users won't be an issue at all. If you have people adding items to the same library/group, that also won't be an issue. If they start editing the same items, that'll start to generate sync conflicts, but I'd imagine that's going to be pretty rare.
- On a practical level, most groups have not had a good experience with too many people being allowed to edit a group library. It's just too easy to mess up or even just to get "messy", so I'd recommend against that. In my (pretty small) team, e.g., we have "Save to Zotero" slack channels where we put things to add and then have 1-2 people who systematically add items, make sure they properly filed in collections and metadata is complete. There may be other options.
2. You definitely will want to work with groups rather than an individual library - easier to manager, clearer accountability (you'll see, e.g. who added what), you can set this up to prevent people from editing/adding items entirely. The way to set this up would be to have one company account that "owns" the group (so that it's not affected when someone leaves the company) and everyone joins it.
I'd consider creating multiple groups so that you have some more flexibility: they could be topical, project-based: whatever works for you. That'd also mean that some of these could be smaller and you could handle them in a more liberal way with everyone adding and editing items.
You'd also want to make sure people were using the built-in PDF annotation functionality rather than creating annotations in an external PDF reader. The latter replaces the entire file and can result in file conflicts if people do it concurrently.
Thanks again!
I'm just commenting to say that I am also in the position of getting a consulting firm that writes lots of reports into Zotero. We started implementation in April. I'd be happy to chat with you in more private correspondence about our transition and what's been working/not working, etc.