Development Platform: Recommendations Requested

[geekgirlau]

Hi all,

I'm working on a project where an application has been developed in Word. Over time this application has grown in complexity, and has now well and truly outgrown its current VBA development (plus it's a commercial product, so VBA does have some fairly serious drawbacks).

So, my challenge is to start investigating the next development for this application. Some general points:

• The next reincarnation will be much more web-focussed, so probably a web development platform is called for.
• Ideally I'd like the application to run on a "software as a service" model rather than client-server.
• The application needs to write data to a database. The number of records for a single organisation is only small (10,000-15,000 per annum), however if we set this up along the software as a service model, it needs to cope with multiple clients (hopefully squillions so I can retire soon!).
• It is likely to still need to do a great deal of interaction with a word processor, and in all likelihood this will still be MS Word.

I'm not a web developer, so I'm after some ideas as a starting point for my investigation. Pros, cons, rave reviews and dire warnings are all welcome. I know the above is fairly vague, but I'm only after an overview at this stage.

[geekgirlau]