Merging databases, triggers? Stored procedures? Growl

Well, now that the main database is up, normalized and working I thought I'd get ambitious and merge another database I'm doing for work. It's a software license tracking database, it would have a common table with this one anyway, "employee" and the current "employee_id" would be a nice foreign key to the IT Ticket's "employee" table. Really not a problem but I'll just have to hand code the data in again as that one was made just in Access. It would also let me migrate into the ticket database asset tags, and IP numbers. User could then further identify problem areas beyond location and add machine name/IP/asset tag....of course they'll NEVER bother to gather this data, so I'll have to allow null fields in the ticket.

The real issues I'm hitting is I want to do more that the Access front end is allowing me to do. And I don't know how to do VB.NET well enough to rework the front end by hand coding.

If I can get some triggers figured out, it'll be ok. I want to change the status to closed and have the database automatically input the datetime in the "date_closed" field.

Which brings up some of my other ideas, now that I've been working with a working BETA model the last couple weeks. I'm going to want to do a priority "low" "medium" "urgent," and also put a status "unassigned," "assigned," "closed" etc. Right now it just presumes the ticket is closed if there is a closed date, but maybe the queries will be be easier to program (date math is a hassle) if I just validate the "status" field.