I have often been annoyed by this application; if you note the times of my journal entries, they are often late in the evening on Saturdays, because I have been awakened by a user support call. I have nearly decided to completely rewrite the reporting functionality of the app (the most brittle portion) in hopes of getting some sleep.
The current architecture is a scheduler that periodically opens Microsoft Access; Access has an "Autoexec" macro that runs reports against the Oracle database using ODBC, emails the results to certain users, and prints the results on other user's printers. Basically, I'll rewrite the scheduler and the Access portion as a perl service using Win32::Daemon.
I'm confident I'll be able to duplicate the Oracle connectivity and the scheduling, but I am a little unsure of how to make the reports look good (and consistent). I guess I could use HTML and tables, but sending that to a printer would print it as html text (it wouldn't be formatted, and tags would be visible.) If I do both in PostScript, they won't be readable by an email client.
<kidding>Maybe I'll do them in POD, use POD2Latex and dvi2ps for the printing side, and POD2HTML to email it.</kidding>
I think the real solution is to use (ack) OLE and HTML; email will work fine, and I'll just use OLE to open IE(eeee) and print.
Maybe getting no sleep isn't as bad as all that...
