The ASP Concept

You and others can have access to a database hosted on the Web from any location that has a browser with an Internet connection.

The Web database concept makes sense if you and your people want to do work in various locations in or outside the office and still be "plugged" in.

For example you could have employees enter timesheets or have sales reps log their contacts. Or perhaps you'd like customers to be able to check the status of their orders online without having to call the company.

If you want a Web database, typically what would happen is that a database such as Access or MySQL (basically just consisting of tables) would be put on the Web.

Then "dynamic" Web pages (actually ASP pages which include VBScript, HTML, and/or JavaScript) would be created acting like the old desktop database's queries, forms, and reports to access the database - all hosted on a Web Server.

Dynamic Web pages are similar in many ways to regular HTML pages. But they are "live" because the user can read from and write to information in the database. An example where you can login and add, edit, or view fictional customers and invoices is at http://www.bullschmidt.com/login.asp

Not all Web hosts will handle dynamic Web pages but many do. The Web hosts that can handle ASP pages usually have a Windows 2000 operating system running an IIS Web server.

Here are a few good ASP sites:
o ASP101 Samples - http://www.asp101.com/samples
o W3Schools ASP Tutorial - http://www.w3schools.com/asp
o Microsoft VBScript Language Reference - http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/default.htm?/scripting/VBScript/doc/vbscripttoc.htm

And the following newsgroup is good:
microsoft.public.inetserver.asp.general

Or for a "quick and dirty" generic ASP solution to putting database tables on the Web that just requires setting up a configuration page for each table or query and uploading the database to the Web as long as you have an autonumber field in each table (and as a more advanced issue you'll probably sometime in the future want to create login capabilities), perhaps try something like this:
GenericDB by Eli Robillard
http://www.genericdb.com

Best regards,
J. Paul Schmidt
www.Bullschmidt.com - Freelance ASP Web Developer
www.Bullschmidt.com/DevTip.asp - ASP Web Developer Tips