Hi,

I'm not a programmer myself, I'm just asking for the advice of the wonderful people who are!

I'm looking to team up with somebody to create a database that keeps track of contact info for 10-20,000 clientele . I'm curious about the level of programmer that would be necessary to create this. I'm in college now and was thinking about finding somebody in the computer engineering department to team up with, but want to have an idea of who I should be looking for (upperclassmen v.s. lowerclassmen etc.).

Basically we need somebody who can create a database that:

-is searchable by the information entered under each contact.

-has several layers of security- one administrative account that can edit anything, and 10-15 other equal accounts that can add to their own sets of information, but can't edit any previous entries, and can't see each other's information.

-looks .

It seems to me that it shouldn't be too difficult- we can almost do it with a very large excel spreadsheet, but not quite, and we want it to have it's own unique UI anyway. Of course I don't really have a grasp of what is difficult in programming and what isn't, so I would really appreciate any advice you have on finding somebody to team up with!

Thank you very much

I almost forgot, it would need to be able to be run on both mac and PC... which I'm sure can't be easy.

Thank you again for any insight!

Why would you want to create a database? Properly using one, and whatever project you're going to use it for, are probably hard enough already. Just find a free or cheap database program others on the web are positive about (I personally don't know of any), and use that.

I'd use SQL server for the database. I believe there is a version that you can use for free if it is not used for commercial purposes.

Then create the UI with ASP.Net or JSP/Java Server Faces.

The security is really the only thing that can be challenging to get right for this project. Both DotNet and Java have a lot of support for security. In fact, Visual Studio (probably pro version and up) can do a lot of the grunt work for you. Just create the inital tables. Microsoft does the rest for you. It will create the pages and even the Login screen. But you'll want to customize it afterwards.

NetBeans (Java) probably does a lot of the work for you now as well.

If I were you I would talk to the computer science department at the university.

But maybe the best way to go is a package that is already out there. There must be membership databases/websites out there that are free or very cheap.

Hope this helps.

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