Starting from scratch... (1 Viewer)

[DTermie]

Hookay...

My company currently uses a combination of faxes and emails for returns requests (RMA's) when then all needs to be manually transposed into our crm package. one of the most annoying problems I have is people don’t fill in the forms correctly or incomplete so I’m wanting to investigate what I could do to turn things around and basically turn it into a web based service... however I’m really unsure of where exactly to start! What I’m after is the ability for my customers to input the data onto a webpage and for me to receive the data inside a database when I can then proceed to tinker. My webpage guy at work has said he can make a form online that sends an email which I’m thinking could be useful if I can import it from that email into the db but I was wondering if there was a way to directly input the data into a db at my end? Also could someone recommend some reading/research material because this is largely new territory to me. I did a tiny little bit of webpage design many moons ago and I’m slowly getting better at databases (this should be my 4th company DB) any help would be great fully received Thanks

 

[georgedwilkinson]

What kind of skill set do you have? Can you use Java, PHP, or .Net?

Do you have access to the source on your server?

 

[DTermie]

me personally i dont have any skills in those area's unfortunatly however i have 2 webpage peoples in the marketing dept at work who are prety good, so i'm thinking a bit of head bashing and teamwork we should be able to come up with somthing. if it isnt something that they know i'm allways willing to learn. i'm allways up for a challange.
And i'll presume that we have access to the source somewhere/how
Thanks

 

[georgedwilkinson]

It can be a long, uphill climb.

I personally have settled on PHP and MySQL for web development (still use Access for local stuff). It can be a bear if you're not familiar with web and relational database development.

 

[DTermie]

well i think i've got a method i'm going to exeplore. my marketing guy said he can get a form on my webpage that will send an email with the data (from the form) inside it. i think ima gonna look at some method of automaticaly exporting it from my outlook on a regular basis and then importing it into the db automaticaly. atleast that's a direction i'm looking at!