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Collaboration through Project Sharing

Paratext makes collaboration possible even in these difficult times when face-to-face interaction is becoming rare. Project Sharing or Send/Receive is available for all registered projects. This feature is heavily used by translation teams to keep on working when it isn’t possible to share an office. Occasionally, however, problems can arise. Many of these issues can be resolved by following good practices. In May of 2020, we started the first in what was going to be a series of articles on Send/Receive. Instead, we’ve gone back to the old Paratext 7 project sharing manual and completely revised and updated it for Paratext 9. It is quite comprehensive and could be titled: Everything you ever wanted to know about Paratext project sharing but were afraid to ask. You can find the link to the manual at the bottom.

In this article we will we will highlight some of the best practices for doing Send/Receive and point out some newer features you may not be aware of.

Best Practices for Send/Receive

  1. At a minimum, do Send/Receive when you first start Paratext each day and again at the end of the workday before closing Paratext.
  2. If merge conflicts begin to occur, increase the frequency of Send/Receive by you and your team members.
  3. When using a Project Plan, do Send/Receive after marking a task complete.  This will update Assignments and Progress for everyone on the team and give permission for them to do the next assigned task.
  4. Do not attempt to manage your Paratext Project folder with other file sharing or backup software. Programs such as Google Sync, Drop Box, OneDrive will conflict with Paratext’s file sharing system and could cause your project data to become corrupted.

Newer Send/Receive Features

Send/Receive button on the toolbar (Paratext 8, 9)

You can send and receive further changes to shared projects on your computer by clicking on the Send/Receive toolbar button, 
This will repeat the last send/receive action you took, sending and receiving the same projects with the same destination. If you need to change to a different destination, or change your selection of projects, you can open the regular send/receive dialog from the main menu, where you can choose a different destination and check or uncheck projects to send/receive.

Send/Receive from the project menu (Paratext 9)

From any shared project menu, you can choose Send/receive this project. This will perform a send/receive of that project to the destination you last used.

  1. Open the Main project menu:
  2. Click Send/Receive this project and Paratext will send and receive your project without requiring you to click on anything else.

Scheduling automatic Send/Receives (Paratext 8, 9)

It is possible to configure Paratext to do Send/Receives automatically–every hour, four hours, or daily. You can also schedule a send/receive every time Paratext starts up and shuts down.

  1. To configure scheduling, go to the main Paratext menu, and click on the Send/Receive Projects command.
  2. Click on the Schedule button.
  3. Click on the drop down arrow for the project you want to schedule.
  4. Click on the frequency of Send/Receives you want.  On Startup/Shutdown is recommended for most teams. This setting will automatically do a Send/Receive for you when you start Paratext and again when you shut down Paratext.
  5. Set your schedule to be more frequent than this if your team is making a large number of edits or if you are having merge conflicts when you do a Send/Receive.
  6. Click on OK to continue.

The Send/Receive scheduler will now perform Send/Receives for you automatically according to the schedule you have set.

Note: If your computer is not normally connected to the Internet, the automatic schedule will be less helpful because Paratext can’t initiate the connection for you.

More…

The Paratext Project Sharing Manual contains much more info, including how to handle merge conflicts when they do occur.  Hopefully it will answer any questions you may have and enable you to work effectively as a team!

Project Sharing Manual

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