something that will work in 5 years on ancient windows7 and ie7?
couchdb
there's nothing to manage.
On Windows, you install couchdb.msi or whatever, installed as a windows service, it automatically boots at startup time.
Start IE7 go to localhost:5984/_utils, you get the DB's UI. At that point, all you did was installation.
One click later, you created the first db called 'somedb', a click later, you created the first json doc called 'somedoc'. Now you can access it from localhost:5984/somedb/somdoc.
For the HTML form, just after you created 'somedoc', you can click on "add attachment" and upload someform.html, then go to localhost:5984/somedb/somdoc/someform.html from IE7, no need for anything fancy. After you're gone, someone with the most basic HTML knowledge can make some changes if need be. No Internet required. Will work as long as the laptop works.
That is a little more complex than, "Here's a .exe, it will save files into your My Documents. Click Export to make a zip, import to read someone else's zip." Plus generating instructions on how to do that would have been tough, and this way should be much easier to spread the app around.
Basically, you don't have a bad idea, and if I were a couch expert or were not on the other side of the world, I might have chosen that. But since I know C#/WinForms well enough, and if we went with the browser I would have to support mobile phones and I don't want to support mobile phones for this use case for a lot of other reasons.
I understand, it was mostly or the-in-the-future-maybe-have-a-web-function-to-sync.
I also suggested Couch because outside of western countries, you seldom find laptops or desktops (outside of cities), but smartphones with a recent browser are ubiquitous, so if it worked on IE7 it would run anywhere, even in the most remote area with no/crappy network. And the first time I used couch, my programming "knowledge" was very basic HTML (no JS).
> if we went with the browser I would have to support mobile phones and I don't want to support mobile phones for this use case for a lot of other reasons.
Yeah... all in all I completely misinterpreted the requirement of your use-case.
couchdb
there's nothing to manage.
On Windows, you install couchdb.msi or whatever, installed as a windows service, it automatically boots at startup time.
Start IE7 go to localhost:5984/_utils, you get the DB's UI. At that point, all you did was installation.
One click later, you created the first db called 'somedb', a click later, you created the first json doc called 'somedoc'. Now you can access it from localhost:5984/somedb/somdoc.
For the HTML form, just after you created 'somedoc', you can click on "add attachment" and upload someform.html, then go to localhost:5984/somedb/somdoc/someform.html from IE7, no need for anything fancy. After you're gone, someone with the most basic HTML knowledge can make some changes if need be. No Internet required. Will work as long as the laptop works.