The design objective for this project is to create an intranet newsletter for a hypothetical company. The system will provide a form for subscribing, a way to validate the entered data, and a method to store the entered data in a server-side database. Users will subscribe online with an HTML form that uses form input variables to store the data. The form input variables will contain the subscriber's name, department, and email address. Figure 6-1 shows the subscription form.
Figure 6-1.
The subscription form.
The data for each subscription will be stored in an ODBC datasource. This ODBC datasource will subsequently be used as a mailing list for a Visual Basic application called Publish, which distributes the newsletter via email. Employees whose names are in the database will receive the newsletter in their email inboxes whenever the Publish application is used. Figure 6-2 shows a sample of the Publish application interface.
Figure 6-2.
The Publish application interface.