Integrating remote data collectors databases and websites

johnooo

Hello Everyone

I'm brand new here and i would like some general info that you could offer in relation to the following query.

I have an Idea to introduce a new system into a company i work for.

Basically it would involve employees who are situated in many different buildings using a swipe card or scanner of some kind to identify themselves to the system. Once the system recognises an employee, the employee will have to enter some basic numerical information under certain categories. This information should then be sent in realtime to database under that employees profile that can then be accessed on the web.

Could anyone please suggest the best / most economical technologies to achieve this and the cost of developing the website and database? Failing this any pointers on where i can find this info would be much appreciated.

Thanks John

p

Have you any more info on the numerical information you're talking about? It's not that clear what kind of info you want? Do you need some kind of display etc... Also, what's the point of the swipe card at all? That's not at all clear.

Overall, it sounds a little bit too much like you're thinking too much about the technology at this moment. There's tons of technologies out there and many companies that could build something like this for you, but there may be a variety of ways to tackle the problem you're after. The hardware is one aspect, and then there's the part that requires web integration. Once the hardware company can dump the data into a database then any web development company could integrate with that quite easily.

It's not going to be a cheap job though.

johnooo

Hi

Thanks for the quick reply. Il try to be a little clearer.

The reason I was thinking of a swipe card is so that an individual person is identified and then a profile of that person can be built up. A display will be required so that the employee can toggle through various categories. The employee will then enter simple sets of numbers under each category. Ideally these data collectors would be a basic and therefore as cheap as possible as many many of them would eventually be needed.

I have a feeling though that the cost to develop the website may be too great for me to run a proof of concept test.

John

p

Do you want to do this yourself now? What skillset do you have available to you now? what is it that you want to test.

You could test this now with a piece of paper. Bascially stand at a few of the key sections, and get people to input the data when they pass you via a questionaire. Then you can dump that data into an excel sheet and pass it around and see if it's useful. I'd really encourage this type of 'low quality' paper prototyping. It's a really easy way to test if something is actually useful without investing in teh technology.

It's entirely possible that something like an ipod Touch could do this nicely and cheaply. It's cheap and portable, but it's really hard to suggest any avenues for you to follow without knowing much more about your the skills and tools available to you, if you've any budget for a prototype, and also more about the actual context of use.

elyod

johnooo wrote: »

The reason I was thinking of a swipe card is so that an individual person is identified and then a profile of that person can be built up. A display will be required so that the employee can toggle through various categories. The employee will then enter simple sets of numbers under each category. Ideally these data collectors would be a basic and therefore as cheap as possible as many many of them would eventually be needed.

If all the swipe card does is identify an individual, then I think it's a bit of an overkill.

Whats wrong with a user just typing their name and password, or personal ID if they have one? You could generate random passwords for everyone and send them out by email.

As for "data collectors", are you thinking along the lines of these being scattered around the organization and the user walks up to it and interacts with it?

Does each employee have a personal computer, or at least access to shared computers? The data collector could be an intranet website, or a desktop application, where the user logs on with their ID and enters in all the required information.

ocallagh

A barcode reader would be easy enough to install. You can get really simple ones that just send the unique ID associated with that card which you can cross reference in your database.

You could then setup a PC at each scanner which, upon successfully cross referencing the scanned ID with your employee database, would open up a session for that PC to accept user input. This data would be sent back to the website (or to a server on your network) and the session would be closed ready for the next scan.

You talk about interacting with user profiles, is this just their row in your employee database or are you talking about Windows profiles?