Problem Reporting System. Need Advide!

Task:
I work at a medium size company (about 90 users) and I was assigned to develop a Problem Reporting System.

The system needs to be accesible by all users and managers with different access levels.

Basically once the users get an error they need to be able to pull up my stand alone application and report the error. The ticket then would be saved to one table in our SQL200 server, the IT department would then examine the reported incident, fix whatever bugs were reported and close the ticket.

Platform:
This system would be running under windows 2000.
And would be programmed in Borland C++ Builder 5 Enterprise.

Question:
What is the best way to do that? How should I go about it?

Any advice, suggestion, comment is highly appreciated.

This should be a secure system in a way that users should not be able to close tickets and etc. only managers and IT people.

You'll need to program in a way for it to communicate over your network... and just use passwords for IT.

Well i'd say go beyond having passwords for different users. I'd say also make a basic user app (error reporting only) and then a tech/admin app that will allow to change everything. Of course you will still use passwords in the admin version, but it cuts down on security holes.

Ask the average high schooler, you could do this type of system over the weekend in PHP. If your dealing with alot of users, and SQL, over the network, why screw around wasting time with platform dependant (windows) things and simply use a web based system to do it? Just throw it on an intranet server using apache with MOD_PHP4. I guarantee you would save yourself alot of headache and hours of long work wondering why things wont work. Some languages are just easier to do things in than others. I love C++ and my STL, and i wouldnt trade them for anything, but if i have to do something like this its no contest for a web based system. And C++ isnt exactly top knotch for developing CGI apps.

The trycky part and maybe the most important one is the we need to be able to use this system also over the internet for our company in new jersey.

So I though about having the error reporting system running as a stand alone exe in the users computers so a screen shot can be taken from the screen in the moment the error accurs and the it get's saved to a sql database here in florida.

The new jersey office would send packaged back and foward through http and then interbase could be used to save and retrive those packages from the sql tables.

The php idea is good but I don't know to be possible to take screen shots of the screen with a browser. Unless I developed my own browser which would not be hard at all.

Please tell me what you think?!

Thank you!

??? <nevermind>

Be careful with it being accessable on the internet. As soon as it is on the Internet, security is the number one priority.

If you used javascript or vbscript im sure you could rig up a small thing to minimize the browser, take a screenshot, possibly save it to a file on their hard disk, and re-maximize the browser. Then its a simple matter of including the screenshot with the form to be submitted over the web. A web based app would be perfect for cross site projects like this. How are the sites linked? VPN? is it possible for secure communication between them for web transfers? These are all just general considerations.

I would not be accesible on the internet Brian. The packages would be trasmitted through the internet.

Vpn would be the method we would use.

The reason why i mention the screenshot is that i've never heard of any script that takes a screenshot of the screen.


Thank you!

I have one question?

Why was my topic moved to the Tech board.

The Tech Board's description says: 'Topic not related to programming.'

That's the only reason why i posted my programming related question in the C++ board, which is the language i program in.

Not a problem at all, just wondering.

I think you'd need some kind of activeX control if you went down the web page road. Anyway here's a start to get some information you will want:
Tasklist >> %OUTPUTFILE%
systeminfo >> %OUTPUTFILE%