John Clark
John.Clark at niagaracounty.com
Thu Jan 30 08:27:00 CST 2003
About two years ago, I wrote a program for our Tourism department that tracks their 800 line requests. Their operators type information into this program from phone calls, messages, and their web site. They do all of this manually, which makes sense for the phone calls, but it seems that there should be a way to replace Email with a web form, and have that information piped into the program...I'll stop short of saying I know there is, because I have absolutely no experience w/this. Now, this department is being "taken over" by an "outside" agency...budget problems have prompted the removal of a couple of depts. and they are being adopted by other sources. This is supposedly a good thing for the county, so I was given as a contact to aide in the migration...basically just answering questions. I guess my boss has setup some sort of support contract w/these folks. Back to the actual question...I spoke to the new director of this agency, yesterday, and he was surprised that they enter information from Email directly. He asked if there wasn't a way to pick the data out of the Email and put it into the DB. I told him that, what they should look into was to have a form on their website, and this data could be put into the DB, w/out human intervention. I did preface this by pointing out that I did not know how to do this. Is this possible? What does it take? What does it take considering the DB is already existant and wasn't programmed for this? Also, they currently use FrontPage for their site, which is hosted by an outside provider. If it can be done, but not w/FrontPage, I just need to tell them this. As it stands now, my involvement ends with a recommendation. But, if it is doable, I am thinking of offering my services. It is just that I am so busy right now, that I don't want to get in over my head either. Thank you John W Clark