First and second class citizens

You are running a network version of Cardbox and you want some users to have different access to Cardbox from the others. For instance, you may want them to have guaranteed access however many people may be using Cardbox at the time; or you may want to restrict the ability to create databases on the user's PC to a group of people whose competence you can trust.

If you want to give different access to databases to different people, that is another matter. User profiles will do that job for you, and you can read about them in The Cardbox Book.

Guaranteed access for some users

Here is the problem: you have an 8-user network, 8 people are busy using Cardbox, and then someone asks you to open Cardbox and sort out a problem for them. You can't: you have to ask one of the current users to close Cardbox and then you have to open Cardbox in a hurry before someone else does. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs!

The solution is to have a 7-user network licence instead, and then to install a single-user Professional Edition licence on your own computer. That way, no-one can use that licence and it's always available for your use.

If more than one user needs privileged access, you could also do it with multi-user licences: for instance, a 3-user licence for the privileged users and a 5-user licence for the rest. Install the 3-user licence in a shared folder and get the privileged users' Cardboxes to get their licences from there; install the 5-user licence on the Cardbox Server, with licence lending turned on. There is nothing inherently different in the licences themselves - the 3-user licence is an ordinary 3-user licence and the 5-user licence is an ordinary 5-user licence - but the difference lies in who gets given access to which licence.

Professional Edition for specific users

You may have a mass of users who only need to be able to use the shared databases and do nothing else: in particular, you don't want them creating databases of their own on their PCs where you can't see them or administer them.

To handle this, install the multi-user Professional Edition licence on the Cardbox Server, and enable licence lending.

For those users who need to be able to create databases of their own (and to do other Professional Edition things such as setting up macros or validators), configure their copies of Cardbox to borrow a licence from the Cardbox Server.

For the remaining users, don't set up licence lending: in fact, don't install any Cardbox licence at all. Their copies of Cardbox will then behave as the Client Edition, and they will only be able to connect to the Cardbox Server and use the databases that you provide for them there.