Office Ultimate 2007 Access Services overview and

Recently on The Access Show Ryan and I introduced Access Services and created a donations application that ran in the browser. I thought it would be helpful to provide some background to the vision and direction. Years ago I came across a post on UtterAccess that articulately described what we hope to accomplish with Access 2010. Stormin on UtterAccess says he is: … looking for clues to how I could create an Access application that would run from within an Access database,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, as well as from the web (from a single point of maintenance, of course!). Reading between the lines a little—Stormin wants to keep all the goodness of the Access as a RAD tool but reap the deployment benefits of the web browser. As we looked at the long term direction of the product and Office—it was clear that Access 2010 needed to allow users to create databases run in the browser that could live in the cloud. There are so many interesting scenarios for how people need to collaborate in the new global economy—making it easy to share databases is a critical step. As we spoke with leaders in IT organizations it became clear they were equally interested in a single point of maintenance. In most large organizations it is very difficult to get IT to provide Access users with a SQL Server and ASP.Net web server for small team applications. They are primarily turning to SharePoint as the tool for business users to store all types of information including documents, Wikis, blogs, and lists. From an operational perspective,Office Ultimate 2007, there continues to be heavy investments in infrastructure to run SharePoint as a server or hosted service (such as SharePoint Online). Access 2007 forged the initial down payment into SharePoint as a platform for Access databases. Access developers told us clearly there were four things that limited adoption of the Access 2007 SharePoint functionality: Data integrity. Developers needed better control over the integrity of the data. Basic concepts like restrict insert,Office Standard 2010, cascade delete,Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2007, is unique,Genuine Office 2010, required, and validation rules were essential for any well designed database. Performance. Performance on SharePoint lists was not acceptable for many applications. Once users entered more than a couple thousand records it was not uncommon to run into performance problems. Web forms and reports. Users wanted easier deployment with forms and reports in the browser. Distribution. Many people indicated SharePoint wasn’t deployed in their organization. Install InstructionsHow do you get started with Access Services? It is possible to install it on a Vista 64 bit or Windows 7 machine for developer evaluation. First, you will want to download the SharePoint 2010 beta and install the prereqs. Here is an article that walks you through installing SharePoint 2010. Assuming you want to run reports on your machine you will need to install Reporting Services before installing SharePoint 2010 and enable session state after the SharePoint install. Here is the download for SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP Reporting Services Add-in. I strongly recommend installing RS before SharePoint. FWIW – we are doing some work post Beta 2 to make setup easier… I think that is the information you need to get started—good luck.Over the next couple of months we will talk about the work that has gone into these four areas. Next up—Ric will introduce you to publish and we have an Access Show that talks about IT manageability. <div