Notifications on messages

[Himitsu]

I need some help with a system I am working on for a construction company. They have lots of workers and they have to post up daily logs of what they will be doing that day. As things progressed, I made a "response" area where other employees could add feedback on that employees log. Well, things are moving a long and there are so many posts a day that they can't keep up with additional posts to past logs. I am wondering if I should just make 3 fields, DateNotified, logReplies and a flag boolean that flags a 1 when logReplies and the Sum() of logReplies are not equal. Then make a script that runs on the server and simply finds that flag. If a record is found that has more replies since the last notification, then it will send the author of that log a message saying someone added a feedback to it.

To me, that isn't too hard but it is limited to the author only being aware of a replies when I think that all the staff needs to be aware of it. Once a million years ago, I had heard of a single field that held the employee ID in it with a carriage return between each. Then have a relationship from the main layout from the employee ID to that field. Like a 1 to many relationship. Now I had heard that if one of those values are equal, than it was true. So I thought I could simple make that field and when someone views that log record it would add the employees ID to it. So on that employees control panel, the title of that log file would be a light gray if the their ID number was in that field. Now if someone adds a reply it would just clear out that field and on everyone's control panel, the calculation would have no true value and would set the title to a solid, bold black. Does that make sense so far?

As I am going through this, I want to go with the last idea but it isn't working at all. If someone has done this before, could you describe how you did it? or, if someone has made a system like this before and have a cool way to do it, could you describe it?