Basically, the answer is "no" to userforms (and Excel in general) on a
web site. Excel should really be used only in a "single user" mode.
Any sort of sharing, even that provided by Excel itself, is, to put it
mildly, problematic.
The larger question of what other applications could be used is a very
broad question, depending many factors, such as how many simultaneous
users might there be, how many records are in the database, what kind
of security you need, whether you intend to develop such web-based
functionality in house or hire it out, whether the users are all
within your company or whether the web site is accessible to the
entire Internet, and, not the least by a mile, how much money do you
have to spend?
If the application is to be used only internally by your company or
working group, no more than, say, 20 users, you could probably do the
whose thing in VB.NET and an Access database, or perhaps even Access
alone. Basic software costs for this would be approx $1000, plus
whatever it would cost to get someone to configure the database and
write some sort of user interface to those databases.
Somewhere in the middle would be SharePoint, which can provide some
Excel-related functionality, running on top of Windows Server 2008 and
SQL Server Express.
At the other end, you could go SQL Server Enterprise, ASP.NET, IIS,
and a dedicated Windows Server 2008 box or two. There, software costs
would be in the $20,000+ range, plus development costs and admin
costs.
Between these scenarios are hundreds of variations.
Cordially,
Chip Pearson
Microsoft Most Valuable Professional
Excel Product Group, 1998 - 2009
Pearson Software Consulting, LLC
www.cpearson.com
(email on web site)
