[freearchitecture] Communications management

[Steve Hall]

Whew, busy week. But I'm not dead yet.

I had another idea probably a bit broader than Free Architecture, but
definitely relavant to the practical day to day affairs of the
architect: communications management.

I have now written/maintained two different apps which managed
document correspondence including address management and simple
document counting. You pick the button and after entering the project
number, a dialog pops with a list of contacts and forms. You make a
few selections and the document is automatically filled, complete with
addressee info, cc's, project name and info, and is named/saved in the
project folder with a consecutively numbered name.

Both these apps were based on embedded macro languages, the first for
WordPerfect and the second for MS Word. Bleh. Along with all the
obvious security issues there are integration problems. And non-Free.
I've always wanted to do one of two alternative ideas:

1. A binary app, accessed from a compatible word processor which hit a
    database for info storage and had some middleware to connect the
    two.

2. A completely web-based tool which again kept everything in a db but
    eliminated the binary app middleware in favor of some form-based
    web app.

The first would have plenty of speed and power and the user's
authoring tool is a word processor. But it wouldn't be as portable and
could be a headache to maintain.

The second method seems much stronger to me in terms of portability,
accessibility and maintainability. But how does the average user embed
formatted tables in a document? Asking them to embed tags even for
bold text seems ridiculous, too. (Although my opinion is that document
could do with a lot less formatting some times. ;)

Anybody here ever considered this before, particularly the Free
solution?

--
Steve Hall  [ digitect at mindspring.com ]