Scenario: Horrifying slow networks. Seriously, sometimes 4 PC's on a 100kb lan....
Websites, even simple, plain ones take minutes to open....
How do you share information between a large number of users over a country, with the planet's crappiest server and network, so data gets to where it needs to go, without corruption in a speed that makes it viable and usable???
For example: Statistical data capturing is not automated. It needs to be manually gathered and captured into a system that doesn't work and is not going to get repaired nor replaced due to the simple absence of funding.
If you would come up with a simple form to capture such data per service point, how do you think one can ensure it reaches the server without timeouts and be usable???
Just a few broad thoughts would be welcome.
Wish I could offer some useful suggestions but this is certainly not an area of expertise for me. Maybe save the form data to a special file format that contains checksum digits. Transfer it over the wire via ftp to the receiving computer that then validates the checksum to ensure all data received. Receiving computer then opens and processes the data report.
Certainly will be hard for you to do any form of real time processing given your network limitations.