Looking for recommendations for offline users

[jymm]

I am just looking for opininons at this point.

I have SQL 2k DBs all over the place and experience with ASP, ASP.Net...

Here is the situation. We have remote sales folks who usually do most of their work offline on their lap tops. In a few short months it will be time to do budgets again. In the past I would take the information from SQL and push Excel files out per Sales person (current sales figures, last years budgets, expenses...) for each customer (not alot of data - say 30-40 customers per sales person and 40 lines per customer). The sales person would then enter projections/budgets for the next year and return the info to me & I would import it into SQL.

I am looking for an easier/faster way to do all of this and figure that asking opinions of people I have helpped or who have helpped me would be good.

The recommendation could be to stay in Excel (alot of work to reformat what goes out & comes back since makeing it idot proof is a priority) -- go in the XML direction w/.net --- or just put it to Access (ick - pooey) and make some forms (he shutters) for the remote folks to do their work. I don't care - I am just trying to figure out pitfalls or limitations at this point.

thanks in advance

 

[mrdenny]

You might want to look into putting MSDE on there laptops, and then giving them a front end. Setup replication on the main SQL Server, and setup the MSDE on the laptops as subscribers. Then have the frontend on the laptops log into the local database. Then when they connect back up to the network there database will update the records on the production database.

Denny

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

 

[jymm]

Thanks Denny -

one small thing I left out --- their laptops are 'DOGS' running win 2k pro --- so replicating down to their machines might be fatal for folks on a slow dial up in the 'boonies'... and we have a number of them...

 

[mrdenny]

The replication shouldn't be to bad. Set the replication to run say once per hour. If you are worried about the amount of data being transferred you can filter the subscriptions, so that they only download there data. This should minimize the amount of data being transmitted across slow dial-up links.

Denny

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)