bass28

I have a need and and idea but I would like some feedback from you seasoned Mambo developers (I have done alot of development but not in Mambo).

My Need:
I have an intranet running Mambo and our employees need to have access to various pieces of information from our ERP system (running on MSSQL). I would also like to create a new Mambo intranet site for our plant floor employees to access information from this ERP system also. I have some web pages built to display the ERP data but would like to integrate this with Mambo. A future thought is to have is our sales reps login to a website running Mambo to lookup order status, etc.

My Idea:
I started writing a new component that basically allows the administrator to setup 'connections' to other systems. The connections DB stores a server name, DB name, login and password. The component could then be expanded to include maintaining a list of groups (to group functions) and functions. The functions would be written to include a DB Layer (DB type independent) that will take care of connecting to the given connection id. A menu link could then designate a connection id and a function id to display a page. Mambo security could be used or a security system could be put in place to secure by funciton or function group.

I feel I have not explained this very well but basically I need to have php pages displaying information from my ERP package from within Mambo and have access to Mambo users and templates.