Enterprise Product Develepment (concept To Rollout)

Hi

I am involved in a product development and want to understand the current best practices from the conception to product rollout. I have few questions. Appreciate your help and suggestions

Our project in a nutshell: Our team has developed the apps. using GUI-Oracle Forms & DBMS-Oracle 8i/9i with weblogic, Corba, windows 2000 server environment. It’s meant for 1000s of users with million of data. We are trying to integrate additional services/capability - messaging (wireless, chat etc.). As per the initial plan we have a central database and users will be using a local footprint database. The deltas (the changes) will be synchronized with the central database at a frequency say daily or nightly... We are concerned that having the database at the users desktop could leave the door wide-open for others to take a look at our code/design...

Questions:

1. UML case tools-- What’s the best tool available in the market as we want to revisit the design phase and identify the things that have been missed out in the prototype-(which was developed by a third-party)?
So far we have used ERWIN to extract the data model...

2. How can we eliminate the need to have a local footprint database at the users desktop.?. Since there is a lots of data, retrieving the data via internet could be very slow for users? (hope this is the case!) That’s what led our team to think of having a local database at the users desktop. Someone suggested to use the data files or caching the data.. Appreciate if anyone shed some light on this.. Is there a better way to do it?

3. Client connectivity: What are the softwares needed at the users PC. Since we use Oracle Forms to develop the application, do we need to install the oracle clients at the users PCs? how to establish the connectivity from the Users PC to our server and to the database. IF we have to use the oracle client, does that require licenses for every User? What do we need to consider from the network connectivity stand point.

4. Application Rollout: how to package our finished product - application exe that is installable across wide array of environment. (we thought of install shield). how do we test it for accuracy etc.,

5. Database optimization: In addition to DBA help, is there any product or proceedures to ensure dataModel optimization, SQL query performance etc.,

Appreciate you sharing your valuable thoughts on this with us..