Hello all

This is a general plea for assistance which covers several areas, therefore I
have sent it to a number of lists. Apologies to those who get it more than once,
but I couldn't decide the best place to send this.

The situation: Over the last year my department has increased its IT reliance
and use considerably, moving from a peripheral database to business critical
applications. This has been great for me, transforming me from an admin monkey
who knew a bit about Access to a 'proper' programmer. 
    We are required to document these projects, but it has always been item 200
in a list of 201 things to do. However, I realised that sooner or later, I'll be
moving on (I work for local government, and the money isn't that good), as will
the other people who understand what's going on. 

    With this in mind, I thought it would be nice to build an application to
allow projects to be documented properly. It doesn't need to be professional
quality, but would require quite a lot of functionality (incorporating
schedules, graphical flowcharts, links to other documents such as training
manuals and code sources etc.). In addition to this, I thought it would be nice
to be able to display aspects of it on the intranet as well.

    My problem is I haven't really got a clue where to start. I intend to build
the interface in VB, in order to leverage all the different kinds of information
I want to include. However, given the fact I want to display and use the data in
different ways, XML seems a logical choice to store the data. I have used XML
and XSLT to display stuff on our intranet, but want to use the technology for
more (it would be useful for my employment prospects).

    So, I'm basically opening this up for contributions and suggestions.
Anything will be welcome from application event flow to schemas for data - if
anyone hasworked on something similar and doesn't mind sharing their experience,
it would be greatly appreciated. Mail me on or off the list, I don't mind
(charles.whinney@i...).

Thanks in advance,

Charles