Please help!!!!!! Shapefiles not showing in AGX

[NgoneSeye]

when I open my AGX application from my computer, it works fine because the shapefiles are stored in my computer. When I open it from another computer, the shapefiles have red exclamation points. I know it has to do with the source of my data but how do I make accessible to everyone??? Please help!!!

[MichaelBranscomb]

Ngone,

You have several options here - but if you simply want to publish your Explorer map to your colleagues and allow them to be able to see the Shapefiles on your machine then I suggest that you try adding your Shapefiles to ArcGIS Explorer via a UNC path.

To do this...

1. You'll need to create a network share first (right click the folder where your data is then click Properties > Sharing). 2. Once you've created the share, e.g. "Data", you and your users will be able to access this via "\\<YOUR_MACHINE_NAME>\Data".
NOTE: Any colleague you want to see the data will need to be on the same Local Area Network (LAN) as you.

The next stage you might want to consider would be moving your data on to a central filserver on your network (LAN) so that when you turn your PC off, your colleagues can still see the data. The process would be the same as if it were on local machine, but now your users (and maybe you too) will access the data as "\\<FILE_SERVER_NAME>\Data". For more information on sharing content via UNC and networks see http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=Methods_for_distributing_tools.

**Better still, you could use ArcGIS.com to host your data and maps and have users access it from there. This would avoid them having to be on the same network - they would just need an internet connection. See http://www.arcgis.com/home/content.html to get started.

What usually happens with sharing data on a fileserver is that somone starts to edit the data and someone else gets locked our of editing, or people make local copies of the data, and then wonder which is most up to date. Then you should start thinking about ArcGIS Server... http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisserver/index.html.

I hope this helps.

Regards

Mike