Communication between Web and Windows application

[Jochen Neyens]

We're in the process of developing an e-commerce application that vets can
use to order medicines. One of the requirements is that the web application
can communicate with a locally installed practice management application
that uses MS-Access as a backend database. This way shipped e-commerce
orders can we imported in the practice management application to update the
stock levels of medicines.

The web-application will be written in ASP.NET / C#.

My question:

Which technology should we use to communicate from within the browser with
the MS-Access backend of the practice management application? I was thinking
of writing an ActiveX control using C# and let this sign by Verisign. Will
this be a good solution? Is there an alternative solution? The interface
will be used by approx 1500 clients. An important aspect is the ability to
deploy code via the Internet. The current order application is written in VB
5 and needs to be installed from a CD-Rom which is a nightmare for code
updates. This has to be replaced with an ASP.NET application whilst
maintaining the ability the synchronise data with the locally installed
practice management application.