Re: DB app recommendations

["Ed Wurster" <eawurster -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Dan asked:

My company wants to take a large amount of proposal-related text (~10K
pages), break it up into blocks of between 1 paragraph and 15 pages, and
store the whole thing in a heavily cross-referenced database, so text can be
pulled for use in future proposals.

Much of the text will have to be scanned and OCR'd into the database, so
current doc formats are not much of an issue. What we have electronically is
principally in Word.

Any recommendations?

> end of quoted message


My suggestion is that your company closely examine the proposal process from
end to end. This will help you identify critical requirements.

Any of the products mentioned in response to your post can be used. You
should take the time to evaluate each product or method suggested. Score
these against the critical requirements.

Cost out each solution, and include purchases, training, and maintenance.

Finally, chose someone to manage the implementation and guide it.

I would start by constructing a simple statement that answers the problem.
For instance, I want to query a database so that company knowledge can be
applied to a proposal. Expand this idea as much as possible, so that you can
distinguish need from nice-to-have.

Consider the output also. If I were the proposal manager, I would not want
to be limited in this area.

I think your best solution will be based on SQL, XML, XSLT, HTML. I would
want to have PDF and Word output options, as some of your proposals may
require that.


Ed Wurster

http://www.eWurster.com/blog/
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