I work for a medium sized computer shop. There are 2 stores in this business that are a few towns apart. They are having a difficult time keeping track of each others work (specials, sales, price cuts, house calls, etc).

They are thinking about using Microsoft's InfoPath 2003 to do this but are worried about vendor lock-in. Before they go any farther in getting someone to set that up, they would to know if there is a better way of going about it. Are there any free, open source applications that would do this (with a web interface)?

Would it just be easier/better to design/build our own system? I would think it would be pretty easy to implement something of this nature using PHP/MySQL.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated, Thank you.