Access 2007 Trust Center File Locations via Group Policy

[Greg Crowe]

Is anyone else having trouble setting and updating Trust Center -->
File Locations via Group Policy?

Background: we have a number of Access based applications in our
company. I recently updated them all to Access 2007. In reading up on
Office 2007's Group Policy features I learned we could use GP to set
the Trust Center's file locations such that users don't have to enable
macros each time they launch an Access app from the network.

All of our apps are located on windows file servers. Most of the
shares look like

\\server\share\app_folder

I created a testing policy with one network and one local file
location. This worked great.

I updated that policy and yet Access 2007 on all my clients only lists
the initial testing locations.

Yes, we have done the gpupdate /force - this just doesn't feel like a
GP issue (I am pretty fluent in it's usage).

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
- Greg Crowe

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

One big problem that you have is that you are locating Access front-end
files on your server. That should never be done. Access files need to be
split, with applications always running from workstations connected to the
data on the server. Running any other way may eventually create a corruption
as 1 user crashing will bring down the app and often corrupt the data. There
is plenty of documentation both on Microsoft's site and at MVP websites to
support this.

http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/splitapp/overview.htm

In the case of Access 2007, the Trusted location should be on each
workstation, usually put in a folder with the company name or the word
"Database", but the name isn't important, and you can bury the Trusted
Location in a subfolder.

 

[Greg Crowe]

Arvin,

Thank you for the response. I am aware of Access' limitations which
you mention. In fact, the server-resident front end has an "update me"
routine onload which looks at the local client, decides if the server
version is newer and if so copies server to client then fires off a
batch to load from the client. If the client version is newer the same
batch file is used to launch from the client. In this manner, we can
roll out updates to the applications during production hours w/o
having to manually (or via login script) update 100 or so clients.

Sadly, this does not address my question regarding Group Policy and
trust locations... any thoughts?

Regards,
- Greg

 

[Nicholas Meyer]

thanks for the info greg crowe

Arvin,

Thank you for the response. I am aware of Access' limitations which
you mention. In fact, the server-resident front end has an "update me"
routine onload which looks at the local client, decides if the server
version is newer and if so copies server to client then fires off a
batch to load from the client. If the client version is newer the same
batch file is used to launch from the client. In this manner, we can
roll out updates to the applications during production hours w/o
having to manually (or via login script) update 100 or so clients.

Sadly, this does not address my question regarding Group Policy and
trust locations... any thoughts?

Regards,
- Greg

 

[Greg Crowe]

Solution: this was indeed a GPO issue. GPO's had become out of sync on
various domain controllers due to, you guessed it, DNS.