Hello All,
I am working on designing an application in Access that produces reports of how the various Products/Projects in an organization are being planned out in terms of their launch. The products can be in the concept, engineering or complete status and for each status a regular (typically monthly) feed of release/launch data (Beta and GM dates) is provided by the respective teams. The idea is to produce a release schedule for all the products based on these dates and publish them in the monthly (could be different frequency depending on the organization's need) calendar. From month-to-month, these release/launch dates can slip and if there is a slip from the previous version of the launch calendar that was published, then the change needs to be displayed in the calendar report. I have designed most of the schema and feel (hope) I am mostly there. However, the critical piece is how to design a schema that can incorporate incoming release data any time of the month, keep a track of the incoming data for any future ad-hoc reporting purposes, and use the latest release date data and the dates used in the previous calendar to produce the next calendar (showing the latest dates and the slippage if any).
I am attaching a picture of an abridged version of my schema I have so far. I have not included some tables that are not directly relevant to this issue. Please let me know how I may incorporate the date and slippage issue and also your thoughts on the design itself. Will be immensely grateful for any guidance. Thank you. (btw, if someone feels it will be useful, I could provide the Access db with the schema itself. It is fairly small without any data).
1. I have put the release/launch date information in the LAUNCH_DETAILS table
2. since the Calendar can actually be published anytime, I have made a separate CALENDAR_VERSION table that related to the Release_Date field. I think it needs to also have a Calendar_Start_Time and Calendar_End_Time that denoted when in the timeline, a particular version of the Calendar was started on and when it go released
3. With all that done, I still need to figure out how to go about extracting the lates release date and checking whether it slipped from what was reported in the last calendar and reflecting that information in the upcoming calendar
I am working on designing an application in Access that produces reports of how the various Products/Projects in an organization are being planned out in terms of their launch. The products can be in the concept, engineering or complete status and for each status a regular (typically monthly) feed of release/launch data (Beta and GM dates) is provided by the respective teams. The idea is to produce a release schedule for all the products based on these dates and publish them in the monthly (could be different frequency depending on the organization's need) calendar. From month-to-month, these release/launch dates can slip and if there is a slip from the previous version of the launch calendar that was published, then the change needs to be displayed in the calendar report. I have designed most of the schema and feel (hope) I am mostly there. However, the critical piece is how to design a schema that can incorporate incoming release data any time of the month, keep a track of the incoming data for any future ad-hoc reporting purposes, and use the latest release date data and the dates used in the previous calendar to produce the next calendar (showing the latest dates and the slippage if any).
I am attaching a picture of an abridged version of my schema I have so far. I have not included some tables that are not directly relevant to this issue. Please let me know how I may incorporate the date and slippage issue and also your thoughts on the design itself. Will be immensely grateful for any guidance. Thank you. (btw, if someone feels it will be useful, I could provide the Access db with the schema itself. It is fairly small without any data).
1. I have put the release/launch date information in the LAUNCH_DETAILS table
2. since the Calendar can actually be published anytime, I have made a separate CALENDAR_VERSION table that related to the Release_Date field. I think it needs to also have a Calendar_Start_Time and Calendar_End_Time that denoted when in the timeline, a particular version of the Calendar was started on and when it go released
3. With all that done, I still need to figure out how to go about extracting the lates release date and checking whether it slipped from what was reported in the last calendar and reflecting that information in the upcoming calendar
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