Help! Can VB do this: Upload and Scanning Challenge

New York Based Web Design and Development Company needs your expertise!

We have a client who performs document creation, transformation, and printing. In other words, if you have a spreadsheet of numbers that you’d like converted into a pie chart and inserted into page 34 of a word document, and then have 500 copies of this document delivered to you by 5pm today, they do it. You hand them a disk with the spreadsheet, a disk with the Word doc, and maybe a sketch on paper of what the final result should look like.

We are about to develop a web-based application that will accept the jobs for them: you tell the web application what needs to be done, you upload the files, you tell the web app when you want it delivered, and you’re finished. The completed job arrives the next day at 5pm.

The challenge, though, is that those sketches (done on real paper with a real pen) are often integral to our client understanding what the final product should look like – and because they’re on paper, they can’t be directly clicked and uploaded. We need to scan before uploading.

We’ve heard that Adobe makes a program that is scriptable that can create a single PDF of things that you scan in. So, we’ve been contemplating using this to actually do the scanning and saving part. Even if we don’t use Adobe, let’s assume that we somehow scan the document and create a single PDF of all the sketches for a given job. It’s saved on the kiosk hard drive.

Now we have a PDF on the hard drive and a bunch of information about the job stored in a session array in the web app. Our challenge is how to get both the information and the file to the server – and associate the two of them.

We have some ideas, but none sound like much fun. Does anyone have any ideas on the best way to do this? Do we need VB?