MS Access as Enterprise Software?

Something that I often run into with my users is their desire to aquire solutions quickly means that they sometimes have said "Heck, I'll just roll up my sleeves and do it in Access - it's installed on my desktop".

Sometimes, we're lucky and the person that creates the Access database back-ends it to a SQL Server, so at least the mdb file issues that often come up aren't an issue.

However, it is my opinion that rolling out an Access front-end to a SQL Server database as an enterprise solution with thousands of users, and hundreds of thousands of rows is still problematic.

What are your opinions on this? What are some of the potential pitfalls?

Is this a perfectly acceptable, stable, maintainable, and robust solution?

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I've had the misfortune to work on Access front ends like you describe, here are some non-Enterpise arguments.

Programming is easy! Creating forms in access is geared toward non-developers. Case in point, if you have multiple columns in a drop down, do you have list fields and data fields. No way! you just set he width of things you don't want to see to 0". So your looking at forms either thrown together by non-developers, or that will irk most people that have to work on them.

Versioning? Who needs versioning?, Just send out an attachment If changes need to be made to the front-end re-deployment is time consuming and fault prone.

This form, I'm thinking magenta The front end doesn't lock down well so end-users can get creative.

answered 2009-01-22T15:14:40.987

MS Access as Enterprise Software?

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