Database Driven Website

[craig13]

Hi all,

I work for a construction company and am after a bit of advice.

We are looking in to designing a database system to manage one of our property maintenance contracts.

We want to be able to accesss and update the database using a website, so users can gain access via Laptops / Smartphones etc. For Example a plumber can log on to the site on his PDA using a username and password and view a list of jobs outstanding for him and update the status once completed.

We also want to have a section for clients where they can log on and view reports on the status of the project.

What is the best way to impliment this? I have been looking at Access 2007, SQL, Coldfusion, Sharepoint but still so confused.....

Any advice would be great.
Cheers
Craig

 

[tehNellie]

If you want something that people who pay you money are likely to use then I wouldn't recommend using Access as your backend database.

Anything else depends largely on a number of factors, not least of which is how much does your organisation want to spend putting this together? Are you going to keep the whole thing in house or pay someone else to implement and manage this for you?

Before you start worrying about which particular database product that you'll need, and I still don't think Access should make that list, I think you need to be clear first about exactly what you want this system to do.

Then look at who is going to access it, where they are going to access it from, how many of them are going to need to gain access and so on.

Are you going to poll all your contractors and attempt to have a [number of] front end that everything from phones to laptops can use or are you going to define the access needed and let them worry about how?

How many people are likely to need to access this system at a given time? If you've bob the plumber, phil the sparky and dave the foreman on site getting jobs from it and Sid from the council looking at pretty reports while you fix his school, your requirements are substantially lower than if you need all of those people from 30 different construction projects, plus all your project managers, accountants etc all going into the system to find out what is going on in addition to your customers going in to look at reports about how the sites are going.

Last but not least, is there already a product out on the market that you can buy off the shelf, within budget that will do this job for you?

 

[neileg]

This is a surprising complex thing to develop. We are currently working with APD (www.apdcomms.com) to do something like this for us. It's certainly not Access based!

 

[Sprawl]

as the above have stated. There's a lot more to it than just simple databases. There's the front end, the design that users see, idjit proofing and then worrying that the back end works as well.

most web pages you see that use data functions these days use a more advanced programming language than simple HTML. either Cold Fusion, PHP, Java, or Flash seem to be the most popular. I believe, but thats mainly my experience, that most Database websites use PHP in some degree for accessing their datbase backend. For the most part i wouldn't use Access as it's not meant for large scale transaction and is missing a lot of speed and feature sets that a dedicated database would provide. I would normally recommend a MySQL back end or if willing Microsoft SQL.

However programming the front end is mroe tricky than say writing reports in Access. it requires more programming know how than anything

 

[snarf2000]

website update

Hi,

I'm using the output from access to update our website.
the output we have is an *.csv file.
Our site uses PHP

 

[Simon_MT]

You can use ASP or ASP.Net and you can definitely use Access at the backend. Try www.flowerseast.com for an ASP application with an Access database. This site has just under 30,000 pages and supports 13,000 images.

You can also look at using MySQL or the free version of Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise.

What I would agree with is that building a web site is no easy task. You could be looking at a six month development cycle or more.

Simon

 

[Fuga]

I´m new to web programming, but wouldn´t Microsoft´s visual web developer with access or sql server be worth checking out?

Fuga.