Runtime

[qwerty man]

Help

I am in IT working in a company; we are all on XP with office 2003.

I obtained the developers kit to deploy runtime to most of our pc's
(this was to stop users who already had Access 2003 installed ,from
modifying the company db (they could enter data but not change the
tables. I deployed the .msi via Active directory in server 2003

It worked well for a while. The problem is after a few office upgrades
to the user's pc's they now can mess with the tables.

Is there a newer version of Access 2003 .msi so that I can impose
control again?
( the upgrade patch makes no diffrence)

I was given the last version by a colleague so I don't know how he
got it .

Has any one tried this before?

Thanks

 

[Pat Hartman\(MVP\)]

The Access runtime doesn't do anything to secure databases. It is different
from the retail version in that if you open a database with the runtime
engine, you will not be able to make design changes of any kind. However,
if you open the same database with the retail engine, you can do whatever
you want to the database unless it is secured.

If you don't want people making changes to database objects, you will need
to implement Access security. Deploying the runtime engine won't solve the
problem since you cannot make people use the runtime engine to open the
database. They can use whatever they have installed.

A quick fix is to deploy an .mde rather than an .mdb (make sure you have a
backup .mdb in a secure place since there is no going back from an .mde to
an .mdb if you loose the original). All the source code is removed from the
..mde. This prevents changes to forms/reports/modules. However, it doesn't
prevent changes to tables/queries/macros so it may not help you.