Access
A Victim of its own Success
Most Access projects start life as single user, tactical fixes to little problems.
Users love it, managers like the reports it produces. More users appear and everyone
is happy. Changes are made, the application just gets better and better.
Now it's become an important part of the business process and IS are no longer happy
because they cant offer any real support for it.
But nobody wants to spend real money replacing it, and besides, there are more important
things to do, so the issue is ignored.
Until...
It grinds to a halt, or the data becomes corrupt, or users get locked-out and frustrated.
It's really not a fault of Access
It's always been described as a desktop database! And realistically, it's a great tool for propotyping and reporting from any database.
Access to Something Else
So, one of the most commonest projects undertaken is to convert an Access application into some new technology, usually with SQL Server or Oracle as the back-end database.
We've done a lot of these over the years and know most of the pitfalls that developers
can fall into!
Best kept Office secret: InfoPath
InfoPath effectively replaces Access for data-entry applications. It's forms are driven by XML Schema and it captures data as XML. Perfect!