Hi,
I am an Expert web application developer having 12+ years of experience with ASP, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, VB.NET, C#.NET, VB, VBA, MS SQL Server, MYSQL, MS ACCESS, Oracle, WCF, LINQ, AJAX, JQuery, Crystal Reports, web & window based services etc.
Here are the answers of your questions:
I would recommend to go with web development approach as it makes your application free of client machine installation and configurations issues as different clients have different OS versions.
Regarding software architecture it will be based upon Service Oriented architecture (SOA) using .NET Framework 4.5 with C#.NET as programming language along with some client side scripting to make the application more interactive.
If you have any question, let me know.
Thanks