[DUG]: Contracting issues - Comments please

[Patrick Dunford]

I am having some difficulty in finding a contracting company in Christchurch to take over maintenance of existing work. These consist of four databases with Delphi applications for data entry, reporting etc. One of the databases is being turned into a web based application by another company. These are desktop databases, not client/server. They run on small office networks with less than 10 workstations, and in few cases will there ever need to be simultaneous access to the data by more than one person.   When I first started in this business, there were four or five companies that I knew of personally that were doing this sort of thing. No longer. Every company that I knew that was doing job work is either full up and not taking new clients, or they have some flagship product that they are busy marketing and selling flat out and don't have the time for other work, or they have closed up their business and now work for someone else.   This is not necessarily the situation in Auckland and Wellington but it appears to be the situation in Christchurch for Delphi work. The choice to use Delphi over the other product systems available was not taken lightly. Once a commitment of this nature has been made it is costly and time consuming to reverse.   Given that most of the work is for inhouse applications, three possible lines of action suggest themselves:   1. Obtain the services of a contracting firm in another part of the country. You can only go so far with remote working, unless you have full administrative access to the machines the software is running on. Someone would still have to physically install and set up the software in the environment in which it is being used. One of the problems we have encountered is that PC support staff out there don't know anything about setting the BDE up on a network system. 2. Develop in house This option entails significant financial expense for the organisations involved in purchasing and maintaining the software tools and they still have to bring in someone from outside to do the actual work. That person is unlikely to have the experience and knowledge of an independent contractor. 3. Port software to a different development environment. In the circumstances the basic database would probably be MS Access and the Access report builder would be adequate for most reporting requirements. VB or VC would be suitable for data entry applications which typically require rather more sophistication than Access is capable of offering.    This approach also provides an upgrade path for existing MS Access databases which exist in the client environments. Some of these would be better run on VB/VC.   In regard to the above, I rather suspect that more of this low level in house stuff is already being done in MSAccess than any other database (how many people do you know that use Corel Paradox for their organisation's internal databases, huh?) and with it being the native database format for VB/VC it makes more sense to go down this path than to stick with Delphi, if we can't get anyone to handle the Delphi work.   ================================ Patrick Dunford http://pdunford.godzone.net.nz/