Is it good idea to transition from MS Access to a webapp? And if so, is Django a good tool to do it?

Hi,

I work for a very small company that I developed an application for, all using MS Access (it has back-end MS Access db - although this is planned to change to some more robust RDBMS, and a front-end app built in MS Access). Currently this app is used to calculate the exact wages of some employees (sorry, English is not my native language so I don't know how that type of wage is called here, but basically we look at how many products they produced and calculate it based on that. It's not a hourly wage). However, this summer I would like to expand it to do some order management too (ie. each order has specific products that need to be produced... each of those can be produced by our employees and so it's directly linked to the wages).

However, it is very hard to manage everything using MS Access. Basically each time I make any change to FE or BE, I have to re-distribute the FE to all of the front-users. This is not a HUGE problem, the big problem, however, is within the MS Access itself, that is, it's very hard to manage all the forms as they are listed as simple names (ie. you cannot sub-group them efficiently to make a tree-view). Overall I cannot see myself working with MS Access in 5 years time as I can already see the scalability problems after a few months of working with it.

What I thought of, however, is making a website that is only for local use, but is it possible to have the same functionality as a regular front-end app? Is this good idea to begin with? I had a brief look at Django (I'm VERY new to web-dev, but I'm a fast learner I like to think) and I really like it so far. But is it possible to have the same level of functionality MS Access offers? That is, for example a sub-form on a form that gives more details about the current record selected in the main form? Ie. main form consists of overview of 10 recent orders and the lower portion of the main form is a subform that displays some detailed info about a selected order.

How does it stand from security-perspective if the app is changed from local to public? Obviously even on local I'd imagine I'd put a login requirement there, similar to how the admin page has it, but how safe is it regardless if put to public? Are there pre-determined measures that if taken, it will be 100% secure? As you'd imagine I wouldn't be very happy if someone deleted all of our inventory records because they could bypass the logging system.

Is there any good literature I can read up on doing some similar exercises/examples? For instance: orders/inventory management web app?

Thanks a lot in advance!

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