hey all,

This is my first post, and I have a book already (the dotnetnuke Wrox book), and I am still REALLY green with anything that is Microsoft.  Just came from a job where "Java Good, Microsoft Bad". 

Needless to say, I need to switch gears here and dive into the deep end.

The company I am going to start with has a DNN portal installed, boatloads of manual processes they want to automate, and users of several different areas - managers looking for reports, people in the field looking for forms and pdf's, people sending in emails of excel sheets for time and expenses.  I was thinking that if the users could be grouped into specific types of users, they would have access to specific areas based on their group access.  The way I thought at first was to cram all of the info into one page and then restrict access to specific pieces, but if I understand(and I don't think I do), it would be easier to have access based on page, and have separate pages for separate groups.  Initially I thought it might be good to have separate portals for each group since some of the info is the same, but most is different.

I'm getting up to speed quickly, but I am curious to see - how much coding do you think will be involved?  I've done JSP and PHP, but from what I am reading and (hopefully) understanding, it sounds as if a lot of the work they are trying to automate is already modularized.  Am I going to need Visual Studio in order to do my work, or is it going to be more admin'ing inside DNN to configure, upload, and tweak modules?

I'm sure I'll have a lot more questions, but hopefully from reading through the forums and keeping up with the book, I should start having things click into place.

Thanks,
rs

Okay, that makes sense.

But from what I understand so far, it's more tweaking and configuring than it is actual coding, correct?  I've never used Visual Studio before.

thx