MS Access as file amangement system?

[SF]

Hi,

In my organization, we have a shared drive in the network for sharing files.
As the files increase, they are becoming unmanageable - It is difficult to
find a specific file. I have started to use access as file management system
by storing the Path of each file to ease the search process. It worked
fairly good except that we cannot control user not to move, edit from access
when user can access those files on the shared drive. This may sometime lead
to a broken link as user move files aroung.

My thought would be saving those file in Access table for better control but
this would bloat the database. Can I use SQL server for storage?

I use Office 2007
SF

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

You can certainly use SQL-Server, but the file sizes wouldn't be much
smaller if you embed the file within the database. There is also a size
limitation on SQL-Express, although I think it's bigger than Access. I can't
say for sure because I use the full version of SQL-Server which has more
than 10 times the storage capacity of my entire network. SQL-Express is
free, but the full version isn't.

I think a better suggestion would be to put the files on the server in a
fixed location and use Universal Naming Convention (UNC) to navigate to
them. That would look like:

\\ServerName\ShareName\FolderIfAny\FileName.doc

 

[Mark Andrews]

Have you looked at Sharepoint or Windows Sharepoint Services. Basically a
web interface for document management.
Document libraries in Sharepoint can be created by users and you can setup
all kinds of security and the files and meta data
about the files is stored in SQL Server. You can use the search
functionality to search for files etc....

You can use regular Windows explorer as well to access files stored in
Sharepoint.

Yes the SQL databases grow very fast.

If you look at the underlying tables in Sharepoint you will see the one with
every file in every site in every document library.

Just a thought,
Mark
RPT Software
http://www.rptsoftware.com