Good PHP/MySQL Development Application?

[-DeaDLocK-]

Hi guys,

I'm hoping someone here can help me in some way.

I have just taken over a company providing a transcription service. How it works is that we take the digital recordings of actual conversations, split them into hour long segments and then distribute them to our transcribers to transcribe. Word documents are then sent back to us, and we then have to distribute these (along with the same audio file) to our proofreaders to do their thing.

We could do it all over e-mail, but I think it would be better to build a simple-ish PHP/MySQL frontend that will serve as the management and interface tool for tracking the flow of recording segments from transcriber to us, and then to the proofreader and finally back to us again.

The requirements:
- A unique login for each user
- A file store with an upload interface, with the ability to link particular files to particular logins
- Some kind of tracking system that will chart and report on the progess of each "job" and each segment of recording within the job

Optional:
- A text-entry feedback system for each job, so that, for example, proofreaders can flag up crap transcribers
- A common library of documents accessible for each job by each user working on that job

Is there a powerful PHP/MySQL builder application that can construct this basic framework for me? I am willing to pay, but as I see this being a one-off usage a freeware app would be much better. Having a PC-side live testing environment and on-the-fly publishing built in would be good as well.

I am quite tech savvy, but I am not a programmer. I can amend complex PHP quite comfortably, but to build it from scratch using notepad would take me ages due to the learning curve.

The other option is to farm it out to an affordable code monkey, but I'd rather not as it is always much easier to work with code and a structure I built and am completely familiar with.

Thanks for any input.

[Tripps]

I can't see that anything this specific would be available as freeware or open-source, but if it is I'd be interested. Have a look around SourceForge, as if anywhere you'll find it there.

There are commercial systems such as BigHand that handle the basic workflow of dictation, transcription and proof-reading, this is used by many of the big law firms, so a fee-earner (ie. lawyer) can dictate something over phone or onto a dictaphone and have someone, somewhere in the world translate that into typed text that is returned to the originator. The system handles time priorities, quality reviews and storage of the sound files and transcribed text, making them available to all.

The other option might be to utilise a Business Process Management (BPM) application, possibly with a eDMS (Document Management System) back-end if the data to be stored was very large. While this would take configuration, it would be more flexible than an off-the-shelf solution. The benefit is a decent BPM solution will provide the framework for each of your bullet points. The downside is cost however, BPM is not cheap and neither are the consultants.

If you need to code it yourself, it sounds like you could do with utilising a workflow engine of some sort to provide the basics of the application back-bone. Microsoft has two engines it provides, one (BizTalk) is quite expensive, while the 2nd (Windows Workflow Foundation) is free and about to hit the streets anytime now as part of .NET 3.0 in Windows Vista. Either of these could be used for a middle-tier that you could then access using PHP to provide the UI.