Preventing Upgrade to 2007

[lizo.consulting]

I've got a client with a database in Access 2000 file format. For the
most part, users are using Access 2003. Unfortunately, a few people in
their group have begun using Access 2007 and I think someone
(accidentally?) tried to convert the file. Because of permissions
limitations, the conversion failed midway.

Luckily they had a backup of the file and they are working on
educating their users not to up-convert the file. Meanwhile, any ideas
on backend code that might prevent future accidental conversion of the
database?

Thanks for any ideas you might have.

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

Sounds as though the application hasn't been split into a front-end
(containing the queries, forms, reports, macros and modules), linked to a
back-end (containing the tables and relationships), as it should have been.

With that configuration, each user should have his/her own copy of the
front-end, ideally on his/her hard drive. In that case, if they convert
their own front-end, it doesn't really matter.

 

[Norman Yuan]

If your Access application is splitted into BE AND FE (if you haven't, you
should, unless there is only one user using it, which is clearly not the
case), and each user has his/her own FE, you would not have this issue. If a
user conver his own FE to Access2007, mostlikely, your Access app would
still work. Even the 2007 version of FE not working, it would not affect
other user in anyway.

 

[lizo.consulting]

Thanks for the advice. Customer was resistant to splitting the
database. Now with this latest incident, they are very supportive of
splitting their database!

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

To be honest, this is probably one of the weaker reasons to split.

Sharing a non-split database is a disaster waiting to happen!