First let me describe my situation, because it shows what all I would need this application to do.
At my company, we have a lot of production data in excel and access database files around on different computers and locations on our network drives. These files are updated during production by the floor workers. It is not uncommon to get bad data entry, rows deleted or overwritten, etc, which is obviously a bad thing.
We do have a SQL server that has been used for some products to make web applications to enter data into them. The problem is these web applications are all custom, do not use the same structure, and there is a lot of duplicating effort. Also there are only 2 people at the company (me being one of them) that can do this type of programming, and our time is so overloaded that we wouldn't always have time to set up new applications for new small databases (so more excel sheets are popping up all the time). I primarily focus on Windows based applications that have to communicate with hardware attached to the computer to automate data collection, and my counterpart does most of the web application for things that only have human interaction.
Both of us have inherited all of this legacy mess and want to get everything cleaned up into a common process for everything. What I envision is a central CMS that is easy to use for setting up reports from the SQL databases, and can be used to quickly put together a WYSIWYG style form for data entry. This would need to be able to calculate a serial number based on the last number in a table, plus a combination of year and week. It would need to then have a few fields for data entry that could do some simple checking (how many digits, etc).
This type of application would cover 90% of our databases and would make migration of all the excel and access databases very easy.
Then my counterpart and I can concentrate our efforts on the few databases we need that have much more complex interactions on the data and cross multiple data tables.
If the application could also do statistical reporting (charting and tables based on a provided SQL query, with some easy WYSIWYG type setup) on the simple databases, as well as the complex ones, that would be awesome.
Now here is the question:
I know we could build an app that would accomplish this, but we would much rather use a COTS solution if one exists. I have not been able to tu up anything that looked promising on web searches though.
Does anyone know of any applications that would achieve what I have described? It could also be a combination of multiple tools.
For instance, I did find this to look at the data and report side (I haven't tried it yet to see if it would work, but it looks promising): https://www.tableau.com/ http://www.jinfonet.com/
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks, John