Spike2 Software and logging in different users

[desheah]

Hello,
I am a lab manager in which we recently set up an ephysiology workstation to mimic a collaborators who came and installed it for us. Our lab is very new to all of this, let me start out by saying. An issue that we have is that as an administrator of the computer, I installed the software under my username/password. When someone else wants to use the software, they need me to log in since the software requires access to two folders called spike and spike share. If they log in with their username/password, they only have access to spike share folder and the software won't run properly. Is there a work around for this? Our IT department here is not able/possibly willing to have a shared login for this computer. Thanks in advance!

[Greg Smith]

I am assuming that we are talking about the situation where you have installed Spike2 as the administrator of a machine and you have users who are not administrators trying to use it.

You have not told me which version of Spike2 you are using or your serial number, but assuming it is a supported version (9 or 10) or at least 8, you will find information in the online help:

Table of Contents
General information
Folders (or where are my files)

Please read this and see if creating the folders suggested there gets you going. For each user, you need to create the folders (SpikeN stands for Spike10 or Spike9 or Spike8). The first folder is:

My Documents\SpikeN
You may want to copy the contents of your logins "My Documents\SpikeN" folder (Data,Scripts,Sequence,ExtraDoc and TrainDay) for each user so they have access to the same things. If you are Administrator on the machine, you can see the users My Documents folder as: C:\Users\'UserName'\Documents.

For example, if you are running Spike2 version 9, each user needs to have a Spike9 folder in their My Documents.

The second folder is:

C:\Users\'UserName'\AppData\Local\CED\SpikeN
where 'UserName' is the user name.

It is not clear to me which folders are causing your problems, but I am guessing that it is either the All-users data directory: Documents\SpikeNShared
or the All-users application data directory: C:\ProgramData\CED\SpikeN. It should be harmless to allow all users to have read/write access to these folders; however that is an issue for you and your IT folks. These are the fall-back folders used when the two folders I suggested you create are not found. Not having any of these folders available is not something I test... so I could well imagine that Spike2 will struggle if it has nowhere to read/write settings.

If this does not help you, then I need more information about what does and does not work and what are the exact errors you see.

[Greg Smith]

It would be nice to know if creating the missing folders solved your problem or if you found an alternative solution...