Access 2007 and sharing data

It’s been a while since I’ve posted something. The last few weeks were extremely busy with your avergae run of the mill Sharepoint tasks, answering questions, provisioning sites, working in our new test environment.

This week we had a data access problem to tackle. Someone wanted a database on a SQL server. This database was going to be linked to from Access and needed to be accessed by people off site and or not affiliated with us. No easy task with VPN and security concerns. We thought “What about Sharepoint?”

My initial thought was ok, ya, maybe let’s see how it works. I knew accdb files could be uploaded unrestricted to Sharepoint, that’s all well and good. I decided to publish the database to Sharepoint just to see what would happen. The tables were created into lists automagically, pretty slick. The database I was working with was pretty basic so I obtained 2 more robust databases and published these.

Again, my tables were converted to lists and I still had full functionality of the Access forms, reports, switchboards, and queries. This was pretty awesome.

By using Access as the database engine instead of SQL Server, we can provide a database for users to share data and not have to worry about firewall rules and VPN accounts. We can create accounts specifically for user not affiliated with the university to get Sharepoint access already, why not utilize that functionality?

Plurk This Post Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post