From: gregarican <greg.kujawa@...>
Date: 2005-04-20T22:54:34+09:00
Subject: New P.O. application I'm working on...

I am starting the task of moving a purchase order application from a
clumsy Microsoft Access platform to a nice Rails/SQL Server platform.
Obviously this is all involving a Win32 environment. Since there are a
lot of sharp minds in this group I was wondering what y'all thought
would be best in terms on integration strategy.

Currently a new P.O. that's entered in the system is printed out of
Microsoft Access to a fax printer driver, where the recicpient's
details are then manually chosen from the fax software's phonebook as
part of the Send Fax dialog. With the new application I would like a
Rails form to automatically fax the P.O. to the recipient. The
recipient's details are stored in the SQL tables so I could pull things
like the name, fax number, phone number, etc. programmatically.

Here's where I would like an opinion. Would it be simplest/best to
implement a Win32 DDE solution to accomplish this? This option would
require me hooking into the fax software application, which might be
daunting task for someone of my coding caliber :-)