With Access 2010, you can move your tables to SharePoint, and create end-user forms in
Access that will show up in SharePoint as a special site. The
MS Access 2010 web forms have a similar look and feel to normal
SharePoint pages, and you will need to design your web forms in MS
Access 2010 separately from any client forms you want to display to
users when they view your database using Access on their own
machine. The formal name for the feature is "Access Services,"
but expect it to be replaced by something more descriptive and less
"techie" in the years to come.
- Better collaboration
across your company.
Allow users to share and manage
information via a central SharePoint
site.
-
Fewer end-user requirements. You no longer need to make
sure all your users have Access and
your database installed. They
simply open a browser and start
working in your web forms.
-
Fast web-applications
without requiring a professional
developer. You can
create a fairly simple, but
functional, web application in
Access 20101 in a matter of hours.
Access 2010 relies
heavily on Microsoft Office Share Point
Server (and Microsoft SQL Server), to
make data, forms, and reports available
to users over the intranet (or if set up
properly, the internet). Users
with the full Microsoft Access client
software, and security permission to
create a new Share Point Server site,
can create tables, forms, and reports in
Access 2010, then "publish" the database
to Share Point. From that point,
users with a standard web browser and
security permission to access the Share
Point Server site, are able to view
forms, manage data, and print reports.
Unlike the traditional Access
"client" forms, Access "web" forms rely
on the new
Access Data Macros to drive a web
applications' behaviours. For
example, after updating a field,
checking the data in another table for a
specific condition before allowing the
update to complete. In contract,
Access 2007 and lower versions allow you
to use a combination of macros and
Visual Basic to control the behaviour of
forms. Access 2010 will continue
to support both client and web forms,
but only the web forms will be available
to users on Share Point Server.
For anyone with an existing database
that you wish to convert to Access 2010,
that of course means creating new
web-compatible forms. In the
sections that follow, we will dig deeper
into how Access 2010 works under the
covers. You may also want to visit
our page on
Microsoft Access 2010 web database
system requirements to learn what
you will need to have in place to
support Access Services.
After you have created a web database, or converted your current
database to the Access 2010 format, you will need to run the Web
Compatibility checker.
Provided all your tables pass the check, you may publish your
database to Share Point. During the publish process, Access
moves the Access database contents (forms, queries, reports,
modules, macros) to the server. Doing so means other users with the
full version of Access 2010, and security permissions, will be able
to download a local copy of the database, and create or edit
tables/forms/reports/modules. For more on how tables and forms
are published to Share Point, read on...
During the first "Publish" process, Access 2010 will create Share Point lists (effectively SQL Server tables) for each of your tables, move the data from Access to
the new Share Point lists, and create special links in your local
copy. Each time you download and open a copy of your Access
2010 database, Access will download the Share Point list data to
maintain a local cache of the data for better performance.
Access will perform incremental synchronizations to update Share
Point with any changes, and download and changes made on the server.
Another important note, an Access 2010 web database does not support
local tables. You can create linked tables to another ODBC
database (Access or otherwise), however.
As with
the rest of Share Point Server pages, your Microsoft Access 2010 web
forms published to Share Point are converted to ASP.NET pages with
javascript to support page events. During the "Publish" process,
Access will transform any Access web forms in your database to .aspx
pages that are placed in the project's Share Point directories.
The layout of the pages is effectively driven by HTML tables (which
becomes obvious when you start working with the Access 2010 web form
design view, where you are able to create, merge, resize, and delete
cells in the table (form). The controls on your form must be
placed within the cells, which helps Access 2010 to transform the
Access form into an .aspx page.
When an Access 2010 database is published to
Share Point, Share Point controls user security related to:
- Who can read and/or manage data in a specific list (table)
- Who can download a local copy of the Access 2010 web database
Note that if you have security permissions to visit an Access
2010 web project site, Share Point will by default allow any user
with a full copy of Access 2010 to download and edit the actual
Access 2010 database. The implication is that any user with
security access to your project site can create/edit/delete the
tables/forms/reports/queries/modules in your Access 2010 database.
There are methods to prevent a user from downloading a local copy of
the web database file, such as eliminating the top toolbar in Share
Point where a user can choose to download the database. But
Microsoft Access 2010 itself does not have any controls in place to
prevent object editing once a user has downloaded a copy of your web
database, nor does it have a mechanism to prevent the user from
synchronizing their changes to Share Point.