Keeping Applications Healthy

Description

The following recommendations for keeping your distributed applications healthy come from experienced Alpha Anywhere developers.

Implement and then use a good, frequent backup system. It's not a question of if you will have a problem, it's a question only of when.
If your workstations are using Windows 98, turn them off at night. All the way off, powered down. Discourage users from multi-tasking with other large applications. Alpha Anywhere needs all the horsepower these systems can muster.
Maintain a trouble log. This is a journal of sorts; a place where user problems are written down and the solutions, too.
Think about version control, and systems for distributing changes when modifications become necessary. Create something that makes sense to you, and then use it. Be certain to document your changes and to keep backups of interim versions, in case you have to roll back to an earlier one.
Investigate automating some housekeeping functions if you have not already. (Index rebuilding and reconstruction, zip file backup creation before critical changes (end of month?) for possible rollback, etc.)
Error logging (logging errors to a table) to capture potential problems. Similarly, user logging is also helpful at time, e.g. recording when users do a major operation, like printing report, importing/exporting, whatever you deemed important. This returns numbers that allow you to see what is used frequently, and then can be optimized as Needed.
If using memo fields, there are many techniques that can be used to improve reliability.