Hi all
I am looking to find out if/how folks have leveraged EGW and used it to support tasks outside of its original design. Essentially , we provide all the services of a resort, as well as a university, making our data tracking requirements a task that requires a lot of human intervention.
BMSC is a field research station that provides boats, vehicles, meals, accommodation, and technical equipment to visiting researchers, university classes, and short visit groups ( 1-3 day duration).
Our primary need is a central tracking facility for room, meal, marine & terrestrial vehicle, and other facility bookings. The resource module in EGW works OK for boats & rooms, but not so well for consumables such as meals and other small items.
The commercial options for such a tracking system will cost well over $10,000 CDN, along with annual fees, and charges for any custom work. I realize this is all fairly straight-forward when working with MySQL, but the user interface is the CRITICAL feature here - most folks want to click one button that will do all the summary for them for the day (Ie Cafeteria needs total count for each meal, and dietary requirements). If I can show that we can hire a programmer to write the extension to EGW, rather than having a separate server/DB system for about the same money, I can get better buy-in.
A second ability we would like to have, is a full-fledged Student Information System/ Alumni tracking database. I know that the address book can be easily customized using the EGW admin tools (Custom Fields). We need to track not only grades and courses, but if the individual returns for graduate, post graduate, teaching, or staff role. We also need to track their home institute affiliations over time.
Thanks
Ken
