Bringing back the love for Microsoft Access
I have been working for Microsoft now for about 13 years and even before that my career was highly focused on Microsoft products and services. My first job was as a trainer for a Microsoft certified training partner. One of the courses I taught during that time was "Developing in Microsoft Access". Little did I know at the time, while I was happily training power users, that I was likely being quietly cursed by the folks running the IT environment for those users.
The trouble with Access has always been part of the core reasoning for it's success... It is an amazingly powerful tool that is really easy to build solutions in. The problem with that is that in the hands of end users, they can create very compelling data repositories that no one in IT knows about. This results in an island of business critical data that isn't being leveraged to it's fullest potential and can become a management nightmare for IT when users create lots and lots these little islands.
Well IT admins can rejoice because Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 mean to address that tug of war between empowering end users and ensuring administrative governance of enterprise data. With the introduction of Web Databases in Access 2010 together with Access Services in SharePoint 2010, you can give users the agility to address create adhoc data solutions and publish them to a centralized repository that is managed by IT.
Instead of users creating their data solutions in an isolated MDB file that sits on a network share or in their personal files, they create a Web Database using all the data capabilities of Access (tables, queries, forms, reports and so on) and then they publish the solution to SharePoint. The result is a web based version of the Access solution that can be shared with others while providing IT with the means to control and maintain the solution in a centralized way.
The Following WhitePaper is a really good primer on this new level of integration between Access and SharePoint and should server to enable IT Admins to breathe a little easier while still empowering end users to create adhoc solutions to address their business needs.