Flexibility? Can JTX incoporate or emulate MS Access forms?

[PhilHasty]

Not sure exactly how to ask this, but...

We are a single-man shop in a small city (pop. 8500) with an ArcEditor license. I'm looking at adding JTX and Workgroup Standard Server to share a work-order system across our network.

I made an MS Access db that DPW/Utilities uses to keep track of thier jobs, note this was not a GIS centric approach.

At first I am very attracted to the JTX solution (from the ESRI product webpages), but after looking at JTX overview
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/0038/003800000001000000.htm
, the forms appear fairly structured, as in, "this is what you get" and "this is how it works". I'm hoping that's not true.

Our Access program has a top section including Customer data and request with comboboxes selections for DPW division, priority, job category... , below that are tabbed pages with subforms for job status, utility meter info, job costs (with subtables for employee and manhours, equipment and hours, and materials...). I'd lke to add tabs for GIS, Area of Interest... and all the tables and relationships...

It works well but the structure has no security and it was my first program, so you can imagine the trial-and-error mess of code (shudder)...

So, instead of relearning the VBA code and jumping through the difficult hoops of getting this done and the fear that with my feable knowledge of MS Access will not make this a timely project, not to mention any future requirements like web access... I was hoping to use the structure of JTX to deploy this citywide keeping with the 10-or-less concurrent license. But I have not come across any editing of the forms as with MS Access. Again hopefully I've been looking in the wrong place.

I'm guessing there is an online help file available somewhere, could someone please post a few links, thank you.

Also, if it is appropriate to ask, could you post a few screenshots of customized forms dealing with customer work request and job cost...

And how did you share this across the network?

Thanks in Advance,
Phil
9.3.1 Editor, XP

[TopeBello]

To answer your first question on �??this is what you get�?�, you can customize the look and feel of the application as much as you want. There are different options available to you that do not require any form of development. Turning tabs off and on, removing commands from the main toolbar, the job type and workflows, etc.
But you can take it a step further and do some development by adding your own tabs/view and commands to the current interface of the application.

The entire JTX/Workflow Manager system is based off tables that reside an SDE database. So for you to use this, you will have to transcribe the job types in your access database to job types in the workflow manager system. This will take care of security for you using the security models that we have in place in the application. We use windows login credentials to make sure that users connecting to the system indeed have the proper permissions.

You can write your own custom form that interacts with these sets of SDE tables using the workflow manager API. This can either be a windows form or web page. For the webpage, you can take advantage of our server extension to access the job information and also serve it across your network.

For product information, I will suggest that you take a look at the help system for the workflow manager extension. We are working on our resource center as well and that should be available within the next few weeks. That will be another avenue for more product information.

Let me know if there are other questions.

Tope