P.G. Daly's Intranet Talk:
Using the Intranet to Improve Internal Sales Communications

Can you imagine a sales force roaming the countryside selling products without access to up to date customer information? A marketing department that cannot even find out which customers are in which territories without calling a third party vendor? Well, then you can imagine my reaction when one division explained to me that a third party vendor (lets call them "DataPeople") maintained all the customer data for their division and that the only way salespeople could get this information was to phone DataPeople, have them run a report, and then have it sent via fax or mail. Certainly not the most efficient or cost-effective process on the planet.

I suggested that perhaps it would make more sense to make this customer database available on the Intranet where the salespeople and marketing division could run reports whenever they wished. After a short reassurance that the Intranet is not accessible by "the whole world", I got the go ahead to make this happen.

Using Visual Interdev and Active Server Pages, I built a web application that would access DataPeople’s customer database (Microsoft Access). In order for everything to function nicely behind the company’s firewall, the database had to reside inside the firewall (in this case, on the actual web server). On a weekly basis, DataPeople sends a copy of the database via FTP to one of my company’s Extranet web servers. Then, a scheduled job executes to move this database from the Extranet to the Intranet’s regular staging area which uploads to production several times a day. So, without any human intervention whatsoever, the database and thus the application always have the most up to date information.

The web application itself allows the user to specify a number of criteria for reporting. Criteria can include one or more of the following:

• customer name (or partial name)
• a specific sales person’s territory
• state
• full or partial zip code
• one or more of 5 specific customer credentials and/or credential status (my company doesn’t sell directly to the consumer, so credentials are a big part of the marketing machine)

The user can choose criteria or just use all the defaults to run a generic report. The SQL is generated "on-the-fly" and the results are sent to the browser. Currently, reports are limited to viewing on the browser or simply printing from the browser; however, more enhancements are on the way such as being able to download the information into Excel or generate a PDF file.

This application accomplished several things. Firstly, it improved access to the information and allowed users to run reports on demand based on criteria they specify. Secondly, it improved the quality of the data since the salespeople could notify DataPeople of additions or changes that needed to be made to existing information right from the web application via an HTML form that gets e-mailed directly to DataPeople. Lastly, it saved the company money since it virtually eliminated calls to DataPeople to request reports (and thus reduced billable hours).

Although this solution would not scale to work with multi-gigabyte databases since it would take forever and a day to transfer the files on a weekly (or even more frequent) basis, it is certainly a viable solution for a wide range of information users need access to that might be maintained by a third party.

As always, comments and feedback are appreciated. You can e-mail me at paulag@enter.net.

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