Hey there everyone. Have I got a treat for someone out there.
Are you a SQL Server DBA, Developer, Report Writer?
Do you align with a desire to spread God’s Word?
Do you love working in an evolving/energetic environment? Read the rest of this entry »
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Here are a few interesting links and articles from around the web.
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Here it is. Our first Christian web resource spotlight entry. The idea is for us to spotlight various Christian web resources that you may find useful in your work and your walk. Read the rest of this entry »
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I’ve been looking into something that may appear to be a tall order. We are needing to look at options which allow for online/offline form completion, online submission (queued?), workflow and data integration. Now, I’m sure I can find that right off the shelf at a price-point a non-profit can afford, right?! 
The use case is that this organization has staff all over the world. Many of whom are in the US with broadband connectivity. Another significant number of folks are in remote regions of the world where continuous electricity is a luxury, not an everyday reality, let alone high speed internet service. Yet, the staff still have monthly reports, for example, that need to be completed, emailed to an individual in the US, and then that data is then re-keyed into back-end systems. Just to email these reports, some staff may have to travel a couple of hours to get to an internet cafe to send the emails. Yikes!
So…this got me thinking. If we cannot effect improvements to remote infrastructure, what about improving the other pieces of the process. This lead to the thought of providing forms that staff can complete when they are offline, store them and then when they are connected, they can click a button or automatically submit then. The difference here is that those forms then are submitted to a web service that imports the form data into a workflow and eventually into the backend data systems, all “auto-magically”.
Given some of my background, I immediately began thinking about Microsoft’s InfoPath, MOSS 2007 and BizTalk Server. While this might do what we need, the initial cost AND ongoing soft costs may be more than this non-profit can handle. So, to Google I have gone to try and see what other options are available.
Below are links to some potential options that have been found and will require more research. I am posting this now though in hopes that you might have some experience, ideas or solutions you would be will to share by commenting below.
How about open source? (most all of you know we are big open source proponents)
Many thanks and blessings to you in advance.
* Quask – Form Artist product in combination with their workflow and business process automation offerings. No idea of costs available.
* Cardiff LiquidOffice
* ProcessMaker – Open source workflow
* Bonita Workflow – Open Source
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