No, she doesn’t do Visual Basic, but she is already pretty good with Access.
If I’m understanding her correctly (and part of the problem is that she’s not a native English speaker, so it took me a while to get exactly what she’s looking for), she’s looking for something like this. The problem with that software is that it costs $12,000… I suppose I could sell my car and pick up a couple of shifts at McDonald’s…
The budget for this is not exactly fixed, but a couple of hundred bucks is doable.
At the small insurance brokerage where I work, my employer and her prior employees had 15 years worth of client/agent information all on paper. I managed to convince her to let me buy Access.
I “self-taught” myself, (because I figured how hard can it be, it’s an MS Application) and created a mamoth relational database that worked just fine. But that’s all it did was work fine. A year later I decided to enroll in at a metro community college (databases using Access 2003) night class 3 hours a night once a week for a couple of months.
Totally worth it. Just small little things that can help with efficiency and/or help sort out in terms of structure, etc. are worth learning. That said, I think Access could be just what you’re looking for.
Couple things, it’s difficult to judge what to recommend based on the info given. “Pretty good” with Access is pretty vague, and if she doesn’t know any Visual Basic I’d be apt to state that “Pretty Good” is overstating things a touch since many of the most advanced abilities of Access require VB scripting. This is not to say it couldn’t be picked up fairly quickly, but it’s relevant.
Also, I guess it depends what data, how much, and for what use we’re talking about here. If she really just wanted a central repository so she can retreive the data, sort and do some simple summaries, anything more than Access (and frankly Excel would do the trick) would be serious overkill.
If she wants something more robust that allows new data to be added via simple forms, data integrity enforced, and dynamic reporting then you’ll be wanting something bigger.
That begs the question, how much bigger? A fully developed Access solution? A stand alone propriotary software program? The latter is the expensive solution as you’ve seen, and that doesn’t imply it would be easy to use or idiot proofed either. Access can certainly handle whatever you want to do, but there’s learning curve and development task involved. You could even contract that development out for a fairly managable price. It’s pretty simple and it’d be a deductable business expense, I think.
I have seen the following in organizations that purchased off-the-shelf DB solutions:
-Borderline silliness in the way business was conducted because “The software doesn’t work that way” Nonsense. The software is a tool, it needs to conform to your needs, not vice-versa.
-Bottlenecks because only a small number of people took the training and/or had “seats” to access the package.
-Poor implimentation because a person from point above didn’t understand needs of another department. Real Example: Bill of Materials (BOM) contains only one vendor, and only that vendor’s part-number. No generic part number. No in-house reference where the six instances are used in each machine. Etc. Person who set it up was purchasing. Needs of engineering and manufacturing were totally ignored.
My point is that only by growing your own, will you make it fit the needs of your buisiness. If you buy an off the shelf product, to some extent you will be forced to change the way you do buisiness to fit the needs of the software. And by growing your own, you will be able to fix the errors/bugs/whatever.
You can do the “hired gun” thing, but that depends on you being able to communicate your needs to someone who doesn’t understand your buisiness. It may well be easier to learn SQL programming than to teach an SQL programmer enough about your buisiness to do a good job for you.
Hmmm. My experience (at least in regards to report building) was exactly the opposite. At least as far as Reporting Services was concerned.
It’s likely a case of what one is used to first. Had I done Oracle initially, I’d probably be complaining about all the others, asking “why can’t it do what Oracle does?”
I agree with RaftPeople in that you should purchase software more closely tailored to your needs. You don’t want to spend more time creating & managing the database than running the business.
You could try Act. It’s a contact management system that can be customized to your needs. There is an online demo and a free trial that you can download. Currently the full version is only $210 USD.
Good luck!
SiouxChief, you beat me to it. The problem with growing software to accomodate your needs is that you may end up constantly modifying it. You need to figure out whether your business is too unique to go with an off-the-shelf database. I suggest you start by listing a few things that the database MUST do. If you can find something off the shelf that will do those things, and maybe some of the NICE to have features (with or without customization), you might be better off.
One can make a total mess of a custom-creation if they are not well-versed in database theory and GUI development–and it may not even be necessary.
I tend to agree with this. Growing your own, assuming it’s not a exceedingly complex system you’re looking for, is the best way to make sure it suits your needs.
However, generally speaking, I disagree with the concept that communicating your needs to a developer would be too much work to make it worthwhile. I whole-heartedly agree that taking a proactive stance and learning the back-end yourself is a valuable way to spend your time, there’s something to be sai for experience. You knowledge will be useful in maintaining and using it, but even the best training is likely to lave you somewhat unprepared to build something from scratch.
Can you more specifically outline your needs and goals? What do you suppose the datasets would contain?
Based on the OP, it sounds like all you want is a high-level customer tracking tool. No mention of any complex trending or charting needs. If that’s true, I’d guess that the resulting Access app would be pretty simple.
Sorry folks! It’s been a busy couple of days, and I haven’t had much time for thread maintenance.
I’m downloading the free trial of the Act program to see if that’ll do what she wants… I’ll have to let her play with it for a day or two.
Anyways, thanks again for all the input, guys! Mucho appreciado! 
Also, on reflection: there have been a lot of questions earlier in the thread that I have not addressed… I apologize for that; lack of time, and poor understanding myself of exactly what she’s looking for in a database.
It may be that all she really needs is a good PDA.
Anyways, I’m presenting her with a couple of good options (thanks to you guys) and hopefully she’ll be able to take it from there and choose the best solution for herself.