[zarlor]

It looks pretty complex, mainly because someone had asked me for a more step-by-step method on exactly how to do it, but in reality it's really pretty easy once you get it down, and actually I find it a lot more convenient for my local group than simply sharing the .hl file. Especially since once you've got the URLs in place the file gets updated whenever you save it and you only have to change a couple of things in that updates.xml file, you never have to mess with the URLs again. The next time anyone in the group starts up Hero Lab after you've made a change, it lets them know just like any other update and they're good to go.

So simply sharing and/or emailing may seem like it has less steps, but if you wrote all of the steps out to do that and included the steps the rest of the group is following to import the file, it's not really that many less steps when all is said and done. And if you're doing any number of updates (for my local group I maintain the "master" of all of their character profiles for 2 different games, so those sheets get updated every advance) it ends up being less steps in the long run.

Still, whichever works out easier is definitely going to be the way to go and it never hurts to have options!