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Omegabundle for Xojo 2025 Products

Tech Week 2025: Xojo + Workgroup

What are some considerations in building workgroup solutions using Xojo?

Xojo provides an excellent platform for building workgroup solutions for small-to-medium sized business. It is unlikely that your potential or present client is an expert in the different ways you can implement workgroup solutions and how one type of implementation comes with certain constraints and limitations than others. That is an added value of having an expert help advise them on implementations that will satisfy their needs for productivity particular to their business. Going into Tech Week 2025: Xojo + Workgroup, we will make a few assumptions.

  • The system needs some form of user authentication
  • The system needs some form of secure, centralized data store that can import, export and utilize the data for business purposes
  • The system does not lock them in to an expensive, difficult to maintain solution

There are also other considerations, especially once you drill down into industry specific requirements. Let's look at considerations for building client-server workgroup solutions with Xojo.

Tech Week 2025: Xojo + Workgroup

Client Authentication

All businesses are likely to have employees that come and go and so require granular, secure access to the system. It should not be a hard sell to convince a client that two factor authentication is the way to go. Fortunately, GraffitiSuite Desktop provides a solution.

GraffitiSuite Desktop includes GraffitiTOTPField and the GraffitiTOTPProvider class for time-based one time password value display or entry, complete with auto-progression and display of validation status.

These classes together implement two factor authentication. The application uses TOTPProvider to generate a Time-based One Time Passcode (TOTP). The end user 2FA Authentication app does the same. TOTPField is an entry control for this six digit code, which is then compared to the one generated for validation. Your client application submits the value to a server for validation during the login process.  A server isn’t required. It could be entirely implemented client-side, but client-server is the typical integration.  You can implement some sort of authorized login state (this is typically no more than 30 days) wherein the user does not need to re-validate their login and TOTP.

Versions of both classes are available for Xojo Web as well (sold separately) if you later need to expand to support web client access.

 Tech Week 2025: Xojo + Workgroup: Integration & Workgroup Sharing

Integration & Workgroup Sharing

No matter how vertical a market you serve, integration with system and common business tools remains important. For example, small to medium sized dental offices remain a popular vertical market with Filemaker solution developers, but Claris Corporation (a subsidary of Apple, Inc) supports integration with Microsoft Excel. A new platform that offers little or no integration with other common industry specific applications or operating system features has an almost insurmountable barrier to success.

Xojo supports integration with special operating system features right out of the box, but several Omegabundle for Xojo products expand the range of the types of sharing and integration.

Office Related Integration

PDF Related Integration

Xojo supports PDF generation right out of the box, but lacks a number of features that you don't want to learn as a surprise later. One example of this is font handling when dealing with international character sets.

macOS Related Integration

If your client has a mixed or Apple only workplace (iOS devices, macOS computers, etc), chances are good they will want to leverage features that are a part of the operating system.

Linux Related Integration

Windows Related Integration