Hi Mark,

Since it is going to be intranet, I would look into a two tier application with VFP7, VB, Access, C++, C# etc as a front-end and Oracle as a back-end. Also, I think Oracle has its own native client front-end. Since you already have experience with VFP, that would be the logical choice for you. Two tier is much faster and cleaner that three tier and the employees of the agency should be much happier with it that three-tier. Also, two-tier would allow better security, as each user could have their own username and password with appropriate permissions. A browser interface, especially Netscape, can be painfully slow even in a local setting. If the agency later decided to go internet, then you could provide the middle tier with VBA, perl, php, java, etc scripts to expose limited parts of the application to the world at large. Also, with the third tier you would need the perl, php, ASP, etc interpreter to run your scripts unless they were built into the web browser itself like java VM. The two-tier and three-tier could coexist happily together and should not be any problem.

Also I might mention that employees at remote locations can use the internet to connect to the Oracle back end just a easily under two-tier as three-tier and this would avoid the middle layer which can make an application exponetially more complex.