The paper presents experiences made when developing a prototype of an information system for a complex multi user environment at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL. The application combining ArcGIS with an Oracle database will be used to plan environmental reconnaissance flights and manage the aerial photos taken. Based on examples from the application, topics such as relationship classes, versioning of geodatabases and transactions between the ArcMap interface and the geodatabase are discussed. Simple examples are presented to show the strategy used to develop this multi user environment.