Migrating our intranet to DNN we have to integrate some tables from our proprietary HR system. As these are really simple - basically a table with employee data and one with the departments - we would like to write a little module which does the following:

• create a list with all employees
• link each employee to his profile
• let an employee update his profile (as both DNN and our HR system uses the Active Directory user, we can assure that an employee only updates his personal data)
• request a business card by choosing two employees from the list (requesting employee and approving employee) which adds a new row to a specific table
• generate a list with all business card requests and their status

Does anyone has advise how to do this? In particular I do not know where in our existing (ASP based) intranet to find the data how to connect to the database (yes, seriously, but the existing application was developed by someone who left the company and since then the system is running but actually no one of our small existing IT staff has a clue about web development) and how to connect to the database from DNN.

Our webserver is running ASP.NET 2.0 so we cannot use LINQ.

Thank you for your answer. Do you have any further information or example for the second solution, hosting the external DB in any of the supported servers? Does it have any advantages over just querying the database the way with the web.config?

Do you have any example or tutorial which explains how to setup a small basic module using a connection string to an external database? I already had a look on Michael Washington's pages but do not really know how to start. The connection string so far was not a problem.