[thelist] Designing a Centralized System to Handle DecentralizedData
Luther, Ron
Ron.Luther at hp.com
Mon Apr 23 08:54:58 CDT 2007
Randal Rust asked for ideas:
>>Right now, all of the providers submit their attendance records by
paper.
>>They physically mark the attendance for each child and then mail it
in.
>>Then the agency manually enters it into the application to process
payments.
Ewwwww.
>>What we'd like to do is create a centralized system that allows the
providers to enter their attendance.
Hi Randal,
How about a 'push' design as an alternative thought?
You could set up a simple secure FTP site and design an EDI format for
receiving your attendance data. You make that a requirement and let
the agencies write their own apps to output the data in that format.
Maybe some agents can send records real-time, some by scheduled batch,
some by irregular (manually scheduled) batch or a mixture by agency
size or ability.
(You can write a number of 'quality control' checks/reports on your
centralized end. You can build check-sums/record counts into a 'header
record' in your format design. You can send a receipt acknowledgement
signal back to the agencies. There is a lot of flexibility here.
I think this is a more generalized problem that EDI has evolved for.)
Anyway, IMO, it's a pretty common model in industry for companies
gathering info [1] from suppliers/partners that might fit your
situation.
HTH,
RonL.
[1] Data like inventory levels, order status, delivery status from
the freight carriers, new orders, forecasts. It's pretty widely used.
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