I am in the process of designing a system to produce standard and non-standard ad-hoc letters (as a component of a much larger system). These will consist of a number of selectable paragraphs and the ability to add freeform text as well. It needs the flexibilty and functionality of a word processor at the front end(to satisfy the business/user requirements) and the ability to handle a reasonable volumes (as well as barcodes).
At present we have a mini version of the above which produces under 100 documents a day using Microsoft Word mail merge techniques and VB. However this appears to be slow and not very robust. The new system needs to handle at least 20,000 docs a month and probably more !
Is MS Word mail merge the correct tool for this ?
Will it scale to these sort of volumes ?
Are there other products that can handle this better ?
Some Technical collegues are telling me Word mail merge just isnt up to this – are they right ?