Going back several years we went down the do-it-yourself route, only we got someone else to do it for us ! I "used" the IT students at Salford University where one group took it on as a formal project. The tutors had an input and the students worked very closely with us to make sure it did what we wanted.
What they did worked very well - but it proved much too big a task even for a group of about 10 + tutors, despite having the facilities of the University, lots of computing power and several sessions per week to work on it ! I took it back the following year for another group to expand on it - but they found that to cover some of the areas that were missing they had to go back and redesign the basic database tables, which took quite a bit of time so we ended up with a system which still didn't do everything we wanted !
That took two years of fairly intensive work with a large group of computer literates and the resources of a University. Now we're trying to use HECS.
