John W Colby
jwcolby at gmail.com
Tue Mar 25 09:34:07 CDT 2014
Of course you are correct, many are just a couple of people and someone does everything in Excel. I would ask however why Access still exists and MS wastes their time upgrading it over and over if they weren't selling it? It is out there somewhere. I had a client in CT who handled the retirement health insurance processing for several cities. They wrote a custom database to handle that process. At the time I worked with them they had exactly 5 people. They took calls, looked up the caller in their database, discussed the issues, handled calling the insurance companies about billing problems etc. Their "clients" were OLD retirees. I made tens of thousands of dollars over many years on their system. I wrote, from scratch, a call center application for Disability Insurance Specialists in CT. A hand full of VP level execs from the insurance companies in Hartford quit and formed the company, bringing call center work for one specific company along when they started up. The data consisted of a denormalized table of disability claims. I was hired to normalize the data, and then built form / subform / data entry to build a call center app. When I was hired they had 20 employees. When I finally left they had 50 employees and handled many more company's call center work. Of course both of these were done in Access, and both of these were done in the 2003 time frame. DotNet was still just a gleam in some someone's eye. I would caution you that all folks like this ask for estimates. C# developers tend to come in and make a "$40K" bid, which just immediately kills the project. Access can often be brought up with a hand full of tables, a hand full of forms, fully functioning in a few days. Then more functionality added as time goes by. In the case of DIS, they had an existing, minimally functioning (Access) system directly editing the denormalized data. I had to create a system to normalize it into about two dozen tables, and do so such that I could "flip the switch" and they would be up and running in the new shiny app. So I worked for about 4 months getting a brand new system, complete with normalization scripts, tables to hold the normalized data, forms for data entry, and reports. As I added functionality we tested and tested. Eventually we trained the users in the new system and when ready we flipped the switch. At switch flipping time we had about 20-25 tables. By the time I left we had about 120 tables. I ended up billing close to $200K for the call center, but that was over 9 years. Added functionality, added tables, added modules, added reports, added data imports / exports. I absolutely believe that those kinds of jobs still exist. They are never easy to find, and they are always small dollars, billed monthly as the companies can afford / find the need. Can they be done in C#? Absolutely. Probably not as easily or as cheaply for the first handful of tables / forms / reports. And perhaps it is just my prejudice, but it seems like C# developers view this as "small potatoes" not worth going after. Access is truly a RAD environment. John W. Colby Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it On 3/25/2014 9:59 AM, Bill Benson wrote: > Lots of Truckers, plumbers, Website designers, hole in the walls, people > who are paid on 1099s, have no automated systems Do you call ebay and > PayPal a POS system? I send out Word invoices and bill for my time. > > I promised a friend of a friend I would (eventually) build him a driver > notification tool in Access. He can only pay $500, and it has already taken > me 20 hours, undertaken in fits and starts, and I am nowhere near done. He > just doesn't make the money from his business that would give legs to a > real IT budget and (sad for him!) I am the best Access Developer he knows, > and I am none too good. Other businesses must be in this situation and > custom development is way above what they think they can afford. > > I am convinced unless I am told differently that many of those 5 million > plus "small businesses" are really small, and don't have or need or have > time to run or deal with maintenance of a POS Or Payroll Or Inventory > Management Or Contact Relationship Management, or any number of systems, > and after them come the ones who outsource everything, and after them come > the ones who buy canned programs off the shelf, or software tailored to > their market. > > I am not sure what we're debating. I said MS Access has no appeal to a lot > of businesses because large businesses fear it, small ones don't want to > buy and have it customized and maintain it. > > On Mar 25, 2014 1:32 AM, "Jim Lawrence" <accessd at shaw.ca> wrote: > >> Hi Bill: >> >> Correct me if I am wrong but are not the major systems in all businesses >> the POS. Accounting, advertising, human resources, inventory and analysis >> are very important but without the POS there is no business. >> >> Jim >> --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com