daily business conflict with web site

[vidkid]

I was hired to develop a web application that allows customers to go online to schedule appointments to have their pictures taken. This should be a 24 hour deal, but we've come up with a small stumbling block.

Our company has employees in place to make phone calls in the evening to members of the churches we photograph for phone scheduling. This is going to conflict with the website in effect that multiple entries for specific time slots will be made.

We call on up to 20 churches at a time, and the same amount would be available for online scheduling as well. It can take weeks to schedule between the two medians.

We thought of allowing access to the site during certain times, and printing out reports daily for the evening callers, but that's not practical, and would be frustrating to someone wanting to use it. We thought of letting the callers have access to a website and check (up to 20) church schedules constantly, but to entrust one of these people with the power to retreive information and have access to the database is certain death.

So, as we're trying to come up with a solution here, I thought I'd join a web community and ask for ideas here.

Thank You in advance.

Chris

[Compguy Pete]

if the churches are anything like the ones around here they are lucky if they even bother with email let alone sign up for something online.

What I might suggest is this thou... If an email can be sent to 1 person after a web order has been made why can't you just have that one email forwarded to all the callers to crossreference with their own list.

I hope this helps but it's what I got from your post...

[Zipline]

Sometimes projects don’t have an optimal solution. It seems like your best bet is to build an interface for the callers to enter information into the database. Maybe you build an interface similar to an outlook calendar that has all available slots and allow them to click on a slot and fill out a form with the information of the person on the phone. Finding a way for the callers and organization to use the same database is the only way (while using the database) I can see to assure no overlap. You can simplify the registration process as much as possible to make it easy for the callers but unless they input directly into the database then you will have constant overlap.