RE: [MLUG] plans for a small business

["Pottinger, Hardy J." <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I would not rely on Access for mission critical stuff. It's just not
robust enough, and handles locking in a really ham-handed way.

I'd suggest PostgreSQL as a back-end database. There were some glowing
reviews of it on the list a few weeks back, I believe. They're
warranted. In particular, if you want to connect via ODBC from Windows,
the PostgreSQL ODBC driver is still *way* better than the MySQL driver.

Grant-funding a techie to do and maintain could leave them in a lurch.
If their techie is good enough, they'll likely be tempted to leave with
a couple years, or sooner.

But, with that caveat, items 1-6 could all be done with a web
application. I'd recommend Ruby on Rails, especially if this is a
one-developer project (shortest path to done, and makes adhering to
best-practices a no-brainer).

It's also entirely possible that some Web 2.0 company will just charge
you a monthly fee to use something they've already cooked up to do this
(think Backpack, Writely, Basecamp). Oh, look, here's one:
http://www.quickbase.com/p/features/overview.asp. There are probably
others.

--Hardy  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: EMAIL:PROTECTED 
> [mailto:EMAIL:PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mike Miller
> Sent: Friday, November 10, 2006 1:20 PM
> To: MLUG membership
> Subject: [MLUG] plans for a small business
> 
> My wife works at a small nonprofit business (they assist sick 
> people with 
> community living) where about 10 employees will need to enter 
> data into a 
> database than can then be used to update various forms and be 
> used by the 
> accountant for various purposes.  Right now the employees use 
> MS-Word and 
> MS-Excel for various tasks, but almost all of their data are 
> on paper. 
> They want to be able to do the following:
> 
> (1) Buy a server that can be connected to remotely.
> 
> (2) Create a relational database with multiple tables and 
> store it on the 
> server.
> 
> (3) Use forms to update the database.
> 
> (4) Allow employees to update the database remotely from laptops.
> 
> (5) Maintain security of the server and database -- only encrypted 
> connections to the database are allowed.
> 
> (6) Be able to extract information from the database to automatically 
> generate formatted reports of various kinds.
> 
> (7) Be able to move data from some of the tables to Intuit QuickBooks 
> (because the accountant knows how to use that).
> 
> 
> They want to write a grant to get money to hire someone to get this 
> working for them and to maintain it.
> 
> What are your opinions on how this can be done?  I would love 
> to see them 
> go with FOSS and Linux, but I'm not sure how much training that will 
> require and what they will be able to do with it.  I can see 
> how Microsoft 
> Access and Office Suite would work for them, but with that 
> solution I'm 
> not sure about #5 - encryption and security.
> 
> Mike

_______________________________________________
members mailing list
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/members