Need help building "Job Application" PC in the lobby...

Hi, All

I am thinking about building a "Job Application PC" in the company's lobby because we currently use paper Job appliation, and we constantly run out of them, and a lot of papers are used.
I thought it makes sense to have a very basic PC that does one thing.

I want it to display the job application on screen, so people can fill it out, and it goes to HR's mail box as an attachment in PDF or some other format.

Of course, the PC is completely locked down, so no service runs on it other than the job application thing.

Is there application that does this? or how could I make a program that does this function? I would appreciate your input.

There are a couple of different ways you could do it. One way would be to build a web-based application program and then just run a browser in kiosk mode on the lobby PC. Kiosk mode gets rid of all toolbars and anything people might be tempted to click on -- it's your web page and nothing else on the screen.

Internet Explorer in kiosk mode
Opera in kiosk mode

By making it browser-based, you can make application submission nearly idiot proof -- the whole thing could be "fill in these boxes and click submit". You wouldn't need to worry about the person saving stuff in the right format and right location, or messing up programs on the computer, or whatever else.

The trick would be getting someone to code a web-based application submission program.

Thanks for the useful info as always, SkyDog.
The idea does sound good though, but do I need Java or something? In fact, I am not too familiar about making a web application. What program should I use?

you could do it with plain dhtml... i could probably make a decent amateur one in a day... just hire a professional

You can do it with asp also. There are templates for that. It depends on what you run on the web server, just build it to run on what the server already has.

Thanks for your input. ASP sounds like a good idea, but it requires either VB or JScript which I am not familiar with. I will if I can get a template from the corporate IT office...or it looks like I need to teach myself HTML. Hehe.

The web site http://www.asp101.com/ helped me a lot when I started messing with ASP. I was already a VB program so the transition was easy, but VB was never really that hard. I would look at the examples that connect to an Access DB for starters. Once you can submit the data to the a database for, you will want to incorporate some type of Java Script validation. Post in the Programming section of the Forum if you have any coding related questions.

Thanks for the quick reply. I will look into the web site...

Is there an application that does this? If it's available somewhere, I am willing to buy one. TARGET and Home Depot have PC based job application on screen. Do you guys know what they use?

Sorry, I clicked on new thread instead of reply.

When we where looking at Kiosks for our retails stores, we found that you either buy packages from companies like IBM or HP which are very expensive or there are people that custom make them. As I remember, the ones at Target would run you a lot of money especially since you are only going to need one and not 1000s. For our stores, I actually developed the app in VB using the Internet Explorer control which accessed our website. I programmed in all of the security and timeouts in conjunction with the functionality of the website. I would guess, you'll either spend a couple thousand at least buying a prebuilt product if not more.

I would take it as an opportunity to learn VB and Java then. For now, there is no dead line for this project, so hopefully I will have it ready by this fall. Thanks for your inputs.