Moving Access Database to Sharepoint

[Jphillip]

I am fairly new at Access, a self learner, but doing well thus far. My
database is set up for property owners, specificly that own multiple
properties. So the main table hold all of the inividual property infomation
such as address, ect... which has a many to one relationship to the owner
information. Is this something that I can move to sharepoint. When I tried to
do this it appeared to delete any relationships that I had. I was able to
edit the entries in the table view at that point but not the form view.

 

[Albert D. Kallal]

You are correct That SharePoint does not support relationships between your
tables for you.

On the other hand you might one explain why you're moving these tables to
SharePoint in the first place? What is your goal here?

Because SharePoint does not support a number of features in access when you
move those tables up to SharePoint then for applications that have a good
number of related tables that your application requires to function
correctly with,
for the most part using SharePoint is likely not a good idea here.

On the other hand if your application only had say perhaps 1 or 2
related tables, then it's only a couple extra lines of code in your
application that you have to add that will delete the child records
when you need to delete a customer name for example.

In other words if you're moving your data tables to SharePoint, then you
must have considered that the advantages of SharePoint will outweigh the
additional work it will take to make your application function correctly.

In other words for applications that only have one table, then the decision
to use SharePoint in this case is often very easy. After you upsize that
table to SharePoint, then people all across the country can have the
access application installed on their computers, and even with wireless
Internet connections, they'll all be sharing the data in multi user mode.

On the other hand for applications that have many tables, are reasonably
complex, and have many relationships, then it makes sense to upsize your
tables to SQL server and not SharePoint. The reason being in this case is
many, but one significant issue is that as your application becomes more
complex, and actually becomes less work to move everything up to SQL server
because SQL server is designed and built to handle those relationships.

However, at the end of the day simply moving tables to sharepoint, or moving
it to SQL server is a big decision that requires some planning and analysis
on your part as to which is a better choice, or if your tables and data
should remain inside of ms-access.

 

[Jphillip]

Thank you for your answer, definatly helped... The reason for moving this to
sharepoint is that, while we are a small company, we have remote offices that
use this information. The connection between the offices is not good enough
to support the database being simply shared on the network. putting this on a
SQL server interests me but I know little about that as well.
I only have 2 relationships in the database as well as 2 subforms. Another
posibility is moving this database onto a citrix server, but the citrix
server we have only supports access 2003 and we are looking at a lot of work
to convert it to 2003.

 

[Albert D. Kallal]

Thank you for your answer, definatly helped... The reason for moving this
to
sharepoint is that, while we are a small company, we have remote offices
that
use this information. The connection between the offices is not good
enough
to support the database being simply shared on the network. putting this
on a
SQL server interests me but I know little about that as well.
I only have 2 relationships in the database as well as 2 subforms. Another
posibility is moving this database onto a citrix server, but the citrix
server we have only supports access 2003 and we are looking at a lot of
work
to convert it to 2003.

Ok, so only two tables with relaonships. This is likey workable.....

A few things:

All your tables should have a autonumber ID.

There should be no compund primarky keys.

You have to write your own code to delete child records when a main parent
record is deleted.

Here is some more info on linking tables, note the list of limitations at
the end:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA101314681033.aspx?pid=CH101741461033

So, you can still use likely SharePoint. However, if people in other
locations can connect to your network, then using one of several free sql
servers is also a possible solution. in other words your trading off having
to write some lines of code in your existing applications to delete those
child records, as opposed to upsizing your tables to SQL server.

 

[David W. Fenton]

The connection between the offices is not good enough
to support the database being simply shared on the network.

No WAN supports that.

Have you considered Windows Terminal Server? This is by far the
easiest way to share an Access app between multiple locations, since
it requires no changes to the existing app.