I'm having problem working out a structure for a problem I'm working on. Here's a brief explanation.
A university has to work out the workload for each member of staff within each school. This is currently done using a spreadsheet using macros locally. What they university wants to do is to have each school work on their spreadsheets locally and they sync them with a centralised database. Each school within the university frequently 'borrows' lecturers from other schools to run certain modules. For the spreadsheets to be syned, this would require the user to logon via an LDAP server, and authenticating against their global username and password.
My problem is that I'm being asked to fully centralise the spreadsheets and I basically need to find a solution that would allow me to query the database and sync it (will obviously need to ensure i dont get inconsistency of data if 2 or more people are working on their spreadsheets at the same time).
At the moment all I have come up with is this:
User >>> LDAP server (auth username + pass) >>> SQL server 2003 holding spreadsheets.
I did suggest using ado.net originally (as i will using .net technologies for this project) due to the fact i thought that the load would be heavy on the server (only a max of 30 spreadsheets in the uni, with 2-3 updates per day) and the cost of upgrading for univeristy to utilise sql server 2005's new features is too great.
Is there anyone that could help me a little with this, structure wise, and what I would need to use to complete an effecient system?
UPDATE: A friend has suggested using oledb instead of ado.net for my querying to the database, do you think this could work?
A university has to work out the workload for each member of staff within each school. This is currently done using a spreadsheet using macros locally. What they university wants to do is to have each school work on their spreadsheets locally and they sync them with a centralised database. Each school within the university frequently 'borrows' lecturers from other schools to run certain modules. For the spreadsheets to be syned, this would require the user to logon via an LDAP server, and authenticating against their global username and password.
My problem is that I'm being asked to fully centralise the spreadsheets and I basically need to find a solution that would allow me to query the database and sync it (will obviously need to ensure i dont get inconsistency of data if 2 or more people are working on their spreadsheets at the same time).
At the moment all I have come up with is this:
User >>> LDAP server (auth username + pass) >>> SQL server 2003 holding spreadsheets.
I did suggest using ado.net originally (as i will using .net technologies for this project) due to the fact i thought that the load would be heavy on the server (only a max of 30 spreadsheets in the uni, with 2-3 updates per day) and the cost of upgrading for univeristy to utilise sql server 2005's new features is too great.
Is there anyone that could help me a little with this, structure wise, and what I would need to use to complete an effecient system?
UPDATE: A friend has suggested using oledb instead of ado.net for my querying to the database, do you think this could work?
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