[thelist] Data structure help

[martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com]

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Hi Steve

I don't have a clue about your specific question (data structures
are a bit beyond me :-) ), but I wanted to validate your idea.

For any kind of workflow, an audit trail is pretty much essential,
so you can
1) track where jobs have got to
2) see who to ask about a given job
3) work out where holdups are (and 'encourage' the guilty party)
4) find out where things went seriously wrong

Although you seem to be talking about a sales lead management
tool, it's much the same for *content* management.

Cheers
Martin
(a thought - how about an audit trail table, which contains fields
for: job id, task id, user id and date/time stamp (oh and a key))



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Subject:  [thelist] Data structure help



Hi folks,

I'm planning to build a tool for our intranet to help plan and manage our
sales strategy. The idea is to build up an "active document" for each
prospective customer. The "document" will be a series of web pages that draw
information from a database to show the following information;
     Which tasks need to be performed
     Which tasks have been completed
     Who completed each task
     When it was completed

Each page holds information about a specific part of the process (i.e.
identifying a prospect, contacting a prospect etc). The idea is that when a
sales person first creates a document for a prospect, it presents a table of
contents and each page. The pages contain information about the steps
involved in the process, but all the actual tasks are marked as incomplete.
The application is both a sales manual, helping to bring new salespeople up
to scratch in a short space of time and a record of all the sales activity
over time.

[snip]

The other problem is that I want to record information automatically about
who last updated a particular piece of information. This can easily be
detected as the system is for intranet use, but I wonder whether I need to
create a second field for every updatable item, listing who updated it?

[snip]
The second seems to be more complicated to program, while the first seems
like it would require a very large table with a great amount of fields. Am I
missing something? Does anyone know of a program I can look at with a
similar sort of structure? Is my description making any sense at all?

.steve



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