Hi there,

This is my first post, hopefully of many, so hi to all.

I work for a company that has developed and supports an OLTP application with a Web-Front End. Its a B-2-B application with all customers belonging to a financial institution and recorded as such. We have been asked to look into providing the same solution and service for a different FI (with their own customer groups) and are keen to keep everything on the same logical model and simply customise the front-end (branding etc). Not supporting this is clearly a failure in the existing design.

ASP's clearly have conquered related issues and I am just looking for some feedback as to what database design issues should be considered. Also hoping there might be some sample schemas out there that might provoke some internal thought.

Clearly we know our business better than anyone else, I just wanted to make sure we considered the main issues as early as possible.

Any help appreciated.

C.

I worked for an ASP that developed an application with a customizable skin.

The application had a standard GUI wireframe and a set of tables to manage the images for each of the specific skins.

Your application itself will have to be standardized to make the implementation of the skin solution practicable. It forced our company to adopt UML and redesign the entire product. The payoff was a standardized, documented system that we could effectively support and integrate with the clients' systems.

It may result in a product with a great deal of potential. Best of luck.