Advise on MS Excel/Access architecture for purchasing system/workflow

Our organization currently manual process for purchase (i.e. users enter data in excel, print hard copy forms, the request routed to next level based on amount for team head approval, after which routed to a team to verify request details before routing to order team for final processing)

We hope to automate this process. Due to budget and other constraints though, we are stuck with 100 GB of shared folder space on a server and are using only MS Office 2003 applications, i.e. excel, access, outlook, word, infopath (no sharepoint, biztalk etc). We do not have a dedicated server to run any IIS nor the fancy IDEs for developing web based solutions like Visual Studio. After reading some articles on the web, I am looking to implement the following "system".

• Create an Excel 2003 Add-in for users which will have menu/toolbar options to generate an request form using a xlt template in a shared folder.
• The workbook generated from the xlt template will have buttons which trigger the macros (user forms) defined in the Add-in (i.e. the template itself has no VBA code, this would separate the "data" from the "business logic").
• The Add-in will be able to auto check for 'version' when launching excel to copy and load the latest Add-in from shared folder.
• a MS Access 2003 db in the client computer for storing look up lists used in the excel userforms (instead of shared folder for better performance)
• a MS Access 2003 db in shared folder to save the data submitted
• when the excel document is completed, the user clicks a button to submit/route the document which would launch outlook and 开发者_运维问答the user clicks send (should a copy of the document be also saved to shared folder?)

A question:

• is there good way to maintain integrity of the excel document? i.e. which is the latest/corrrect document and who has it

Any thoughts on the feasibility or pointers on what to improve (with the above constraints)

You could use an open source version control system like Subversion (SVN) to control the excel document. The there's a SVN client for Windows called TortoiseSVN that integrates SVN with Windows Explorer.

I guess the solution is feasible, although I don't use that specific toolset a lot myself :)

Keeping the various databases is sync is going to be an ongoing issue: both in terms of the schema and data. Making updates could also be tricky.

How much is this going to be used? I mean: how many users, how many concurrent users? Just thinking about how the system will behave if a few people try doing similar things at the same time.