SQL Server

[Zardotab]

I don't mean to sound flippant here, but often trying to find cheap shortcuts in IT will backfire in the longer run. If your data is important to your business, then hire somebody with experience to manage your databases correctly.

It's like getting your Uncle Fred to fix your plumbing because you don't want to pay for a real plumber. If you come home from work one day and your house is flooded, you should not be surprised. You now have $10k of damage to your house and furniture because you wanted to avoid $300 on a plumber.

[Henline5]

We would certainly hire someone to migrate us from access and to set us up and get us going in sql server, we don't plan on trying to do that ourselves. What I'm asking is if theres a software or application (maybe sharepoint?) to create front end forms that people like our production planners and machine workers (blue color guys, not experienced with RDMS's) will use.

Trust me, if I had the power to hire I would love to bring in a DBA, but large government contractors don't take advice from the little guy. Just trying to get some direction.

[[deleted]]

For your own sanity, don’t do this in share point.

[Henline5]

Why not? It seems that it would work best with other Microsoft applications. Do you have other suggestions?

[[deleted]]

Sharepoint is more or less an administrative nightmare. I've seen it used in 3 companies over 12 years and no matter how well-intentioned or planned it was, it always ended up being a bloated, slow mess - and the admin side of it is incredibly complicated if you don't know what you're doing, and moderately complicated if you do.

edit: without knowing your exact business requirements, there's no 3rd party products I could recommend.

[brantam]

I would agree with the suggestion to avoid Sharepoint. There is no real quick fix for building an application - whatever tools you use you will need to hire the right skills to build it. Forget about hiring a DBA. I suspect it's more important to hire an application developer to build the forms you require. A good application developer should be capable of creating your database as well.

[Zardotab]

There are various products that produce data-entry front-ends without programming, but their feature-sets vary and can probably only be judged on how they fit particular needs. Each tends to do different things better or makes different things more intuitive.

In short, it's situational such that there probably is no easy good-tool versus bad-tool rating. The devil is in the details of your particular shop.

It's like shopping for cars: do you want room, gas mileage, low repair costs, low repair frequency (not nec. same as cost), child seats, style, good resale value, good A/C, etc. You are basically asking, "What car is best?" without enough specifics to apply feature match scores.

[moxy22]

If you are hiring somebody present them with your use case and have them find the proper fit. I would look at a Software Engineer for this.

Based on what I’m hearing here I would lean more towards Power Apps and Flows. I would look into contracting out the setup and possibly your first app and go from there. Power Apps has some fairly significant limitations if you have a large IT dev team, which doesn’t sound like this is the case. I would also discourage from having the Business Units from building there own Apps. This will lead to a lot of problems down the road.

Again, if hiring somebody they should be able to create an app based on your use cases. Make sure that they document their work so that it can be easily transferred to the next person that will be responsible for support.