Access 2010 and SharePoint 2010 (seriously)
If you haven’t heard about Access Services (a new feature associated with the Enterprise CAL in SharePoint 2010), then listen now: it’s awesome.
Consider the standard story: IT Departments have limited resources to solve critical business problems. Let’s say they take on ten (arbitrary number) of thirty (arbitrary number) business-submitted projects a year. That leaves twenty (calculated number ;) ) projects that will go unaddressed by IT. At this point the business just continues operating, with their problem unsolved, right?
Ha, obviously not—the business is going to solve their problem, whether IT helps or not. Even if they have to go rogue to do it. Those of us that have worked in an enterprise of any size before know that this happens all the time.
I think SharePoint is a great solution to this problem. Instead of IT abruptly shutting off the solution roadmap, or fixing it to a certain number (ten, above), the business can be enabled to solve these problems on top of SharePoint in a partnership with IT. Lists, Workflow, Web Parts, Office—all great tools to build great composite solutions, but eventually the proverbial wall gets hit and the components just can’t be configured to solve the business problem.
Lets pause and rewind 15 years. No SharePoint, IntarWebz is still growing up--for smaller, departmental applications (which a lot of the left-out-twenty applications would be) the solution will be Microsoft Access. The flaws, problems, pain etc. of Access are well documented (connection concurrency, MDB/MDE proliferation, multiple versions of the truth etc etc etc. But what if we could solve these problems by, say, publishing Access to a web site? (Loaded question.)
This is what Access Services does. It takes your application built in Access 2010 and loads it up into a SharePoint 2010 web site. This goes way beyond just uploading the MDB to a simple document library. Access/SharePoint actually convert Access objects to SharePoint objects. That is: Forms become ASP .NET Web Pages, Reports becomes SQL Server Reporting Services reports, UI and Data Macros become Workflow, and the Tables become Lists! Obviously, this is another great option for building super-powerful solutions (code-free!) on SharePoint.
And now, guess what your backup story is? Yep, you back up SharePoint, and you backup your Access application. Very powerful stuff.
I’m going to try to get a couple more blogs together on Access Services and how powerful this is in the next few days, but in the meantime here are some good resources to get started: