Help with form submissions

Question

Im pretty new to Dreamweaver and also form making as well and
I am trying to put together something for my work. We are presently
using Outlook eforms to handle internal paperwork, including the
one I am trying to get to the web. Which is a Employee/ Equipment
movement form... kind of a MAC.
Anyway, the questions I have is with the Submit button. What
I want to do with it is to both email the layout (including the
information input) and also try to connect it to a database so we
can look at the data down the line. We have been hammered by
auditors over this process (outlook eform).
Esentially what we do when recieving this form is transfer
the data to a Helpdesk Ticketing system and send the account and
equipment requests to the proper departments.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The site address is
http://www.cormarant.com/work
and the specific page Im working on is
http://www.cormarant.com/work/new_hire/main/merchant/merchant.html
Thanks much!!

Answer 1

I'm starting to understand a little bit more. At first when I
viewed your site and saw stuff for new hires and transfers of
employees, my first thought is that you need to look in the
direction of something like PeopleSoft (made by Oracle -which btw
have plenty of other database applications).
But then I saw your other form and it appears that
organization is a key thing and that your forms are not what you
want them to be. However, by the looks of what you have it does not
appear that this is, or should be, running on a public web server.
Instead it appears, and correct me if I am wrong, that this would
go on a local intranet site.
Plus the fact that you don't have a database standard working
and seeing how you manually enter the forms into your help desk I
almost think implementing a full database structure might be
premature and costly to your business.
Have you considered looking at publishing interactive PDF
forms? I really think you should sit down and evaluate some of
Adobe's programs with Acrobat to see if you can utilize that:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/solutions/detail/create_form.html
See that link. You would create an interactive PDF form which
users could quickly edit and submit (even via local intranet) and
then submit it to someone who will enter this information into the
Helpdesk. Plus you would have the saved PDF document which is much
more secure than the eforms and it would hopefully allow you to
increase your workflow. This would mean purchasing at least 1 copy
of Acrobat Pro if your copy does not already own it.
And as much criticism as this may draw here. If you just need
to set up a lot of these forms for people to work with in this
manner, it might even be a good idea to look into a Microsoft
Sharepoint Site (you would need MS Sharepoint Designer to make the
site though). Because this is what Sharepoint is for. To share
documents that can be saved, submitted and sent around so that all
users can view the documents they need to.
I'm just worried that you are going about this in a manner
that might not be much more productive. Otherwise you would need to
get a component that would turn the form submission into a PDF
document since you can't just save it as you see it on the screen
in any other way, and then you would need to go through the whole
process of putting everything into a database. I really think a
pre-made application or process as I described above with Acrobat
would be much easier for your company to implement and might be a
better solution for the near-term outlook.