Free databasebase processing software

1. Why don't you use Access? It is provided within MS Office suite and I'm sure the vast majority of the companies have it. It should suit your needs.

2. If you realy want a free tool, you coud use MySQL server, which is the open source equivalent to MS SQL Server or ORACLE. But being a free product has some downsizes.

1. I know for a fact that, even in a web based environement, Access could handle without fear about 50,000 lines of records (around 54 MB of data).

2. If you fear that they would have problems in managing Access, I'm afraid MySQL will... hm, destroy them ! That's the main problem with open source applications (if you deal with Linux, you'll know what I mean).

3. my advice is to ask someone to design a web based application, put in in a secure environement, with a special designed log in system (that is people with a certain credential should be allowed only to certain pages) and your clients and agents would then just log in their respective areas of interest and check/update/search for information they need. This way you'll deal with a simple and customized application that for sure will match your exact needs. This is not very complicated and should not be very costly. I'm sure you can find even on this site someone to do it for you (me included ).

It is quite difficult to make a corect estimate from what you describe above... It could be anything from few hundreds to few thousand. You can launch a bid here ! So, you can put here the thorough list of features you want and I'm sure you will be pm with a lot of offers.

Among the things you need to specify:

1. Do you have a host or the project should have hosting cost included.
2. How many user levels do you need (and with a clear description of who's doing what - ex. level 1 - only view data, no update, no delete, no adding, level 2, adding, modifying own records, deleting own records etc...).
3. The number of people that will be using it, and also the number of presumtive records (perhaps Access will do it, so you'll not have extra costs).
4. Are there gonna be online transactions (online payments)...
5. are there gonna be using there secure informations (data that need special attention like credit cards, confidential data etc.) so a certain level of data encription should be present... etc.