Office 2010 Key Office Online Community Submitted

Community submitted templates are now live on Office Online!!  "Er?"  You say,Microsoft Office 2010, "what has this to do with me?"  I'm so glad you asked!!

For the first time ever, there is now a Microsoft hosted service through which you can publish and share database applications with the community at large.  OfficeOnline is the template service that Microsoft uses to host its own document templates, and it is extremely popular, with 2.8 million Access 2007 template downloads for since Jan of 07.  For 2007 it has been opened up for publication by anyone who has access to the web.  Initially this support was just for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but as of mid-December you can now publish and share your own Access apps and samples through this service.  Your templates get integrated directly into the system so users searching the site for a specific type of template will find your .accdt files right alongside the ones Microsoft has published.  Community submitted templates are marked with a little red pawn, so users can distinguish them from Microsoft supplied templates, and as with the ones Microsoft publishes, each community template has a rating of 1-5 stars set by the community, and a count of downloads. Here's an example:



NOTE: In order to be able to browse templates submitted by the community, you must choose moderate or unfiltered for the "Community Filter" at the left hand side of the page. 



Publishing

Now, I would love to be able to tell you that you can publish any application created with any version of Access to the site.  For the first iteration this isn't going to be the case.  For this version of the service, we've made an explicit decision to limit the functionality which can be uploaded in a template to features which don't automatically act on the user's behalf to edit or upload data, or to invoke functionality that would otherwise affect things outside the database.  We're intentionally beginning with a very tight set of restrictions, with the intention of testing the system out and understanding the space better before we turn on more advanced functionality.

Here are the requirements for a template published to OfficeOnline:
Because we can open and scan the contents of them in code without booting Access on the server,Office 2010 Key, the only template format we support is 2007's new .accdt format. Templates which use features that require the database to be enabled,Office Professional 2010, including VBA, action queries, and macro actions which change data without prompting the user first will be rejected by the publication engine. Templates cannot have linked tables (if you think you'd need this in a template, I'd love too hear your scenario)
"What?" you say,Office 2007 Enterprise, "But I put VBA in everything!"  Yes.  I know you do.  We want to enable this scenario eventually, but not for this round.  There are a ton of really interesting things you can build and share on the template service which do not use code.  You still have the full power of Access tables, queries, and reports, and you can build user-interface logic in forms using Access 2007's new embedded macro technology.  Plus are a slew of interesting ways to slice data through the use of Queries and Expressions, and you can definitely build and share those.  Here are some ideas of things which might be interesting to publish as templates:
Pre-populated data (e.g. US zipcode table) Pre-designed Forms (e.g. a mahogany form background with polished wood buttons) Pre-formatted reports (e.g. report for Seiko Smart Label Printer 420) Complex many-table union query that returns the results of some really interesting thing A scaled down demo of your for-sale solution with a link back to your own website for the full version
You can even build a fully functional data tracking application should you so choose.  As an example, check out the cool little wedding tracking application built to help couples prepare for the big day by built by Abigail Short, one of the developers on the Access team (thank you Abigail!).

Tools

There are two key tools that everyone creating Access templates will want to take advantage of.
The Access 2007 Developer Extensions - After you've installed it,Windows 7 Key, you will have a Developer -> Save as Template menu item in the Office button.  This is by far the easiest way to create a template file. The Access dev team's own Scott Gardner has put together a command line tool that you can run against your .accdt to pre-verify that it meets the rules imposed by OfficeOnline (thank you Scott!).  Just run this tool from cmd.exe, passing in the location of your .accdt file and it will give you the OK, or a list of issues that will cause OfficeOnline to reject it.  The tool requires that .Net 3.0 be installed on your system.
Submitting

Here's what you need to do to get your template submitted to Office Online:
Choose "Submit a Template" from the links on the left hand side of the Office Online template page (this can be a little hard to  pick out of all the other links, see the picture to the right for a pointer). Follow the submission steps 72 hrs. or so later your template should be live



Reference

You can find some information about Access 2007 templates here:
Introduction to the Access 2007 Developer Extensions and Runtime Blog: Access 2007 Template (.accdt) files
If you're looking for a more complete reference, we've arranged a deal with with Rational Press for blog readers to have a 35% discount on their title "The Rational Guide to Microsoft® Office Access 2007 Templates" by yours truly.  The book assumes that readers will have the need to create safe templates like the ones required to upload to Office Online, and I include a detailed explanation of how to create interesting codeless solutions. 
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