The send/receive feature in FLEx 8

The send/receive feature in Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) 8 has just made collaboration on language projects much easier, and my colleague and I have finally got one of projects up and running under the new system.

Download is available at SIL Fieldworks Download.   A few comments on things that we learned in the process:

• You need an account at languagedepot.org where the joint files will be kept.  Each member will need an account.  If you previously had an account and files there, the account was probably set up for some other kind of synchronization capability (LIFT, which is lexicon only), and you'll need help from the staff to reset your account to the new standard (FLExBridge).
• After you get the account set up there, one member of the current team (call this person manager1) sends a complete copy of the project.  To send the project, you use the menu option in FLEx that says Send/Receive

•  The wrench icon is where you enter your information from languagedepot about your account information.  Here you need the project ID they assigned you, your login, and password.
• After you and your colleagues on the project are sure that you're ready and that a complete version is on the languagedepot site, everyone who is not manager1 should delete their own copy of the project from their computer, then go to FLEx and use the menu item Send/Receive --> Get Project from Colleague.  This will download a fresh copy that will (hopefully) be set up for synchronization with others.
• The way we tested this was for the two of us to be online with the database and a gmail chat window.  We separately modified a text and a lexical entry, then pressed the "Send/Receive" button afterward to check that the project was updating and merging properly.
• This feature is still in beta.  Occasionally the merge was slow or produced warning messages such as "operation timed out; retrying", however it ultimately always succeeded.
• If the operation detects a conflict, it flips up a separate window with the conflicting entries/texts.  You can't send/receive until you look at these and click a box that says "resolved".  You may not notice that this window is present, but if it is there, the ordinary FLEx window acts oddly and you can't do ordinary editing.