hosted sites for Microsoft Access

[Paul Proefrock]

We are a national organization that uses Access to track membership and
registration information. This is presently done locally with a front
end/back end database built on Access.

Does anyone know of a site/application/host/whatever that we could use to
host this application, allowing users to logon and enter/edit data from
remote locations.

I envision something like Remote Web Workplace as is used in Small Business
Server - but there would never be any local machines. All would reside on
the server.

Server might be overkill, really all we need is a machine that would allow
remote users to logon and use Access and Quickbooks

This is probably simpler than I am making it but I can't see the forest for
all the trees in the way.

I've looked at Quickbase (Intuit) and eCriteria but they are flat files. We
need the relational features of Access.

Info could be ported to SQLServer but no one speaks that language - at least
not yet.

Does anyone have any suggestions on the best method to accomplish this.

Thanks

Paul P

 

[Larry Linson]

Many hosting services will allow use of a Jet database (the DB Engine that
installs, by default, with Access). Unfortunately, you can't just link to
that DB on an Internet server as though it were on your LAN. Most find the
limitations of Data Access Pages such that they only use it on intranets,
and then, only for very simple interaction. And, it is published that
Microsoft is "deprecating" DAPs in Office 2007; that is, existing DAPs will
run, but to create a new one or maintain an existing one, you'll have to use
Access 2003 or earlier.

Probably the approach most likely to succeed would be to develop or hire
someone to develop an application for the server using ActiveX Server Pages
(.asp pages) or Active Server Pages Dot Net (ASP.NET) to allow the user to
interact with your database.

If the user community is stable, you might be able to use Microsoft Terminal
Server to let them actually run their database applications on your server.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP