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Hi all,
I've been charged with this little project and while I'm thinking that .Net might be the way to go, I'd love to hear some feedback from all you gurus ;)
Here's the problem.
- An e-mail comes in from source x to user y. User y uses Outlook in an Exchange environment. The email contains an Excel attachment.
- The attachment is almost standard - a 2 column x 15-20 row matrix. Now the fun starts: a) depending on certain criteria, emails go to diff distribution lists. However, b) the excel files also become kind of support tickets waiting for updates from the people on the distro lists. The updates are dynamic, might take days, come from different users or the original user y, and it all needs to be tracked. Eventually when such incident is closed, an e-mail is sent back to user y and the 'ticket' disappears. Rudimentary reporting is also needed.
So, I was thinking of dumping the xls attachments she gets into a 'temp' dir, where a scheduled VB parser picks them up, dumps them into either SQL or MDB database and erases/moves the original XLS. Then have a ASP.NET front end basically bound to the datasource with different users getting rights only to certain filters. I'm hoping that I can reference the outlook library directly into ASP and send out the alert emails from the ASP site. Have an extra field for discussion, another for status, etc. Static queries on the datasource would be sufficient for the reporting part and a Crystal Report on the ASP side would be used to pretty it up and offer an easy export.
Does this make sense? Do you forsee any issues? I've been coding in VB for a while, but never touched ASP.NET and I'm wondering how difficult this will get. I welcome any comments and suggestions and promise to come back soon (i.e. when I'm stuck).
