Developing practice management package?

Question

Hi there--

Just looking for a little guidance here. I work for a small law firm, and we currently use a software package for practice management (open/closed files, calendar, phone messages). Unfortunately, we have had nothing but problems with the software (and from what I see online, most customers do). Furthermore, it just isn't designed to do what we need/would like it to do for our practice.

SO I've decided to design my own program to suit our needs to a "T". I've been exploring options for the past week, and would just like an opnion or two (or three, or five...) from people with more experience.

As it stands now, I have exported our data into Access 2010 tables (Clients, Courts, DA's, Files). I'm looking to have the following features: track open/closed files (files are linked to a contact, have a court and DA assigned from drop-down list), maintain an office calendar (court dates linked to respective files), have a module of some kind to track phone messages, and document generation (much of what we send are form letters; rather than typing information each time, have court address & client name/case number pulled from tables).

I would like this all to be web-based & stored on our server, so no installation is required and it could be accessed remotely. I began to design everything in an Access Web Database, and was very happy with the product - until I realized that it would require purchasing SharePoint Server Enterprise - again, this is a small firm, our "IT budget" is not exactly Enterprise-sized.

After some research, it seems that my best option is to upsize my Access database to SQL Server and then use Visual Studio to design an interface to do as I wish. It's been a while since I've used VS or done any programming (outside some light web work), but through the years I've never had a problem teaching myself anything I need to know. I guess my question is -- would this setup (SQL/VS) allow me to do everything I'm looking to do? If not, is there a better option?

If we have to purchase SharePoint, so be it... but I must admit, I'm a little excited to do some programming.

Sorry for being so long-winded, any help or advice anyone can provide is HUGELY appreciated.

Answer 1

All right.

First of all. You have a couple of ways to do this. It depends of your company's server wether it's Linux or Windows based. I'll assume that you have Windows Server installed on it.

You can do this by writing ASP.Net code (VisualBasic.Net or Visual C# will be sufficient).

Problem might be a database, because you'd need to use a Microsoft's SQL server which can also reach prices up to $2.000.

Good thing is that there is alternative, Open-Source MySQL database and there's a nice tutorial on their website on how to make a connections and manipulate data from the database.



http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/connector-net-visual-studio.html



In the case that you use Linux, you can still use C#, but it requires Mono environment and the MySQL server installed on it, but you'll achieve the sam thing, and you'll cut down the price of project.



Also if you have an Access database you have a small free utility from Bullzip to do a hard work of exporting database to MySQL format for you.

http://www.bullzip.com/products/a2m/info.php



I hope this helps.

Answer 2

how to download the management package for 2010

Answer 3

your computer should be have the server of window7

also you can do it by writing ASP.netcode or if it doesn't work properly then visit some sites on net for some help hope it will help you.

thank you.