Designing Front End to SQL Server Database?

[bluedollar]

Our company is planning to develop a crm/call logging piece of software. I have been told the software needs to be web based. Our company sells and services IT equipment/networks.

My colleague is very keen to use Sharepoint. I have been told that Microsoft CRM is also a good package for what we are looking for.

What we need is a system that will:

1) log every call that we get, this log will include:
- company
- staff name
- client staff name
- time/date
- description
- hardware specific piece of hardware that caused issue
- resolved yes/no
- priority
==========================================================

The ERD would look something like below:

STAFF TABLE (contains name of people in our company)
staff ID
name

CALL TABLE (contains call log info)
company id (linked to COMPANY TABLE)
staff id (linked to STAFF TABLE)
time/date
description
resolved yes/no
client staff id (linked to CLIENT STAFF)
hardware id (linked to SERVICED HARDWARE table)

COMPANY TABLE (list of companies that we service)
company id (linked to CALL TABLE and SERVICED HARDWARE TABLE)
name

CLIENT STAFF TABLE (list of staff at the serviced companies)
client staff id (linked to CALL TABLE)
company id (linked to COMPANY TABLE)
name

SERVICED HARDWARE TABLE (list of hardware that we service)
hardware id (linked to CALL TABLE)
ID (linked to HARDWARE LIST TABLE)
company id (linked to COMPANY TABLE)

HARDWARE LIST TABLE (list of hardware that we sell)
ID (linked to SERVICED HARDWARE TABLE)
description

==========================================================

The above shows the base system. In the future we would be looking at adding:

1) morning check list for particular companies
2) to do list for the companies
3) link the call logging system to our invoicing system
4) if a call need to be booked into be completed at a later date, then it can be booked into the outllook calander
5) the contacts list (CLIENT STAFF TABLE) could integrate with outlook contacts
6) the system would eventually expand beyond this list

==========================================================

I have previous experience designing in:

1) Access/VBA/SQL
2) HTML/MySQL/PHP

==========================================================

My questions are:

1) What would be the best packages to develop this in?
2) What is the advantages/disadvantages of different development technologies in tems of ease of learning/customability/time to develop.
3) any other tips you could think of.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Dan

 

[SQLSister]

There are plenty of these types of things on the market. Why not just purchase one rather than do your own development?

Sharepoint is something we used in a project here. It is buggy and very poorly documented and decidedly user-unfriendly. I would not recommend it. And we had Microsoft employees working on site with us on this project, so if we had a miserable time with it, I can only imagine how bad it would be for someone without the direct Microsoft support.

For web-based things, we usually use the .Net framework, but J2EE is good as well. Neither is easy to learn but both have the full functionality needed to write a robust application. I think for what you want you are gonna need the full-fucntionality of one of these programs. Creating a web-based business application is very different from creating web pages that are mostly information-based. This is why you will see in many of the commercial products that their web interface doesn't have nearly the functionality of their Windows interface.

Questions about posting. See faq183-874

 

[bluedollar]

Thanks for the feedback.

What version of sharepoint, were you using??

How much longer does it take to develop a front end for a sql server database in .net as opposed to access or vb?

Thanks

Dan

 

[philhege]

SQL Sister,

I'm interested in your experience with SharePoint also. We have SPS 2003, and it looks like the Intranet is headed in that direction. My boss thinks SPS and WSS are the best things since sliced bread, although we have yet to design, develop, and deploy a simple custom web part successfully (man, MS's tutorials are garbage!). I have created some decent basic sites, with doc collaboration and crawl/search. But the custom stuff still eludes me.

Agree with you on the documentation, except that they have a new, improved .chm version now. Let me know if you want a copy.

So, anyway, did you develop any web parts? Did they work? Did you find any decent, non-MS resources for tutorials/how-to's/etc.?

tks,

Phil Hegedusich
Senior Web Developer
IIMAK

http://www.iimak.com

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A priest, a lawyer, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says "What is this, a joke?

 

[SQLSister]

Bluedlollar in answer to your version question, I'm not sure what the versions are as I didn't actually use it, our web developers did, but we were working on a research project with Microsoft using it and used the latest version.

Comparing the time to develop in .net vice something else depends entirely on how knowledgeable your developers are in .net. Ours are extremely knowledgeable and can develop in .net as quickly or more quickly than in something else. However, it seems to take a good year of .net experience to reach that knowledge level.

Phil, I'm just not sure exactly what they ended up doing to get the demo to work. I do know they stayed really late and worked alot of weekends. And the demo was a big success, so soon we will be getting the funding to build the actual application. I know even the Microsoft guys were having trouble finding info on making Sharepoint work as advertised.

There is a Sharepoint Forum here, forum820. You might could get better information there.

Questions about posting. See faq183-874