For small to middle size companies, specailly small comanies, how can they make their web site database work with their offline desktop account/customer management/order invoice/inventory database?
Usually we will use the MySQL, Interbase, etc. for online store. And also usually the small businesses will have some kind off line database for account/customer management/order invoice/inventory etc.?
There are many approaches to make these two systems to work together?
Are there any articles, web links etc. talking about this issue? What is your experience?
approach 1: separate them, manually input the information from one to another, such as add the client to the web site database manually from the offline database, and add the online order information from the online database to the off line database.
approach 2: still separate them, but use some tools to help that transfer online database to some format (such as excel docs) that will be able to merge to the offline database.
approach 3: use a well designed system for both online and offline database, for all CRM, ACCOUNT, INVENTORY etc. but the disadvantage is it will be expensive. and not so flexiable. such as for the accounting, it might not be as good as a simple desk top accounting software, for the online database, it might not be as flexiable as using MySQL etc.
In simple words, for small businesses, how to handle the online and offline databases issues?
