Sending photos to Lightroom over network - what works, what doesn't?

Question

This weekend, my wife and I are helping with a photo shoot (member's photo directory for a local non-profit).
Here is what we've done in the past with Picasa and what we're trying to duplicate:
Photographer takes photos, which are saved onto his Windows laptop via Firewire in the studio.
SyncBack SE running on two networked Windows PCs make copies of the photos from the laptop onto the local hard drives.
Picasa automatically detected the newly-taken photos with its "Watch Folder" feature.
My wife and I do some cropping, adjusting, etc, so that the photos can be quickly reviewed and selected by the customer.
We exported the edited photos into folders in JPEG format.
The photographer takes the JPEGs and uses them to guide his re-edits of the raw photos with PhotoShop.
Ouch! Re-editing wastes a TON of time!
This time, we plan to use LightRoom; this will ensure that our cropping and editing will go right into PhotoShop easily (or so I'm told--I haven't USED LightRoom much yet!)
Big show-stopper: testing (by the photographer) caused duplicate photos in the LightRoom library, mitigated by a manual step or two to import as a work around some LightRoom quirks. And LightRoom doesn't really play nicely with network drives, or so it seems.
I think what we're aiming for is to have a "local catalog" in LightRoom, and have the photos stored in a network drive which it will "watch". That way, all we need to do is export our cropped/edited LightRoom catalogs, which the photographer can import into LightRoom, then it's a quick jump to PhotoShop.
... or is this not the tool for the job?

Answer 1

Per documentation Lr is not a network operation and per several posts in this forum is stated as such. I stopped using Picasa when Lr came out for the public. With PsCS5 another tool comes up as Bridge which I have not used. I have only read the basic Adobe description. Though I do know several Pro Photographers do use Bridge with multiple users even in different states. I do not see why you are editing jpegs for Proofs and as samples for a Photographer to re-edit in a different format, no matter which software you use. My workflow uses RAW files and an Import as DNG along with make a second copy to another folder in Lr and archive of RAW files  after a double check of files and I only Export as jpeg after processing. But I only use 1 Lr Catalog and not a network solution.
My way of course is just my opinion of how my service works. Does anyone here also use Adobe Bridge?