Re: Need Advice on Linux vs. Windows for a Database-Driven Web Application

From: William Park (opengeometry_at_yahoo.ca)
Date: 01/19/05 

Date: 19 Jan 2005 06:27:10 GMT

Curious Pete <virtualcowboy2004-curiouspete@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi there. I am hoping that someone here can offer me some database
> advice.
>
> I work at a small company that makes frozen products that are sold in
> supermarkets. We recently hired sales reps in several cities in the US
> and Canada to maintain our displays in stores and to take orders from
> those stores. Each rep visits 12 stores a day and take a digital photo
> of our display at each store. Then they go home, write up an email to
> us about the situation at each store, attach the digital photos to the
> emails, and send it to us. Then they write emails to the local
> distributors containing their orders for the day and send them,
> cc'ing us.
>
> The system is working well, except as we add more and more sales reps,
> the flow of information into the Head Office is becoming a raging
> torrent, and frankly we can't keep up with it. So, we came up with
> the great idea to automate the entire process via a database-driven web
> application. The idea is that the sales reps should be able to log into
> a site, enter a user name and password, then enter and upload their
> report, photos and orders for the day, which would thereafter be stored
> in a database that we could access from the Head Office.
>
> There is a lot of data to input: Store Name, Street Address, City, Zip,
> Store Contact etc. etc., plus all our various distributors and
> individual products. We figure that the system should be robust enough
> to handle at least fifty sales reps covering a total of 3,750 stores.
>
> We sent RFPs to several software companies and received several bids
> back. Okay, here comes the question part: Roughly half the bidders want
> to use Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP while the other half wants to use
> Microsoft/IIS/MS SQLServer/.NET. (We are currently running a Microsoft
> server in the office, but if it was cheap enough, I suppose we could
> add another server running LINUX.)
>
> My question is: Which solution is "better", and, from my (user's)
> point of view, do I even care? (The software-building costs are about
> the same for both types of system.)

Neither. You are already using email. Your staffs know the data
content and know what to do with them. Why not look for a way to
automate your email processing? The reason why you're overwhelmed by
volume is because you are using Windows, and processing the emails
manually.

Script-wise, such email processing is very similar to spam filtering.
On Linux, standard tools are Procmail, Formail, and shell scripts.
Also, having a decent mail reader (ie. Mutt) would help. Email is
bullet-proof, and scales well beyond any Web/Database solutions.

Don't under-estimate the cost of staff training or lost productivity,
because of silly computers trying to solve problems that don't exist.

>
> I am looking for a robust system that will last our company for several
> years, that can be added to as we think of more bells and whistles, and
> that will need minimum maintenance.
> Thank you in advance!
>
> Curious Pete 

-- 
William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>, Toronto, Canada
Slackware Linux -- because I can type.

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