Microsoft Access Runtime Edition

How to Save Money on Access Licenses

Many organizations grapple over the decision about which edition of Microsoft Office to license. Typically the two leading contenders are the Standard and Professional Editions of Microsoft Office. The single difference? Microsoft Access. Yet a large majority of your staff will never need the full design and programming capability of Microsoft Access. Rather, they simply need to enter and search for data stored in a desktop database. Only a few employees may need the ability to design and build Access databases for other users. Save large amounts of money by reducing or eliminating unnecessary Microsoft Access licenses in your organization.

HOW TO MINIMIZE LICENSE COSTS

 Few companies know that Microsoft provides a free runtime version of Microsoft Access which can be installed on any Windows desktop, and run any Microsoft Access database application. By providing some users with only the runtime version of Microsoft Access, your organization can save a significant amount of money.
$499 (Professional Edition license) - $399 (Standard Edition license) = Savings per User
Savings per User * (Total Access licenses – Access developers) = Total Savings
For example, if you have 100 Access licenses and 5 Access developers, you can eliminate 95 licenses for a total savings of $9,500. An even larger organization of 5,000 employees can potentially save $400,000 or more!

KEY CONSIDERATIONS

There are several major considerations when choosing to migrate some users to the runtime version of Access, each of which can be easily overcome by using UI Builder™ for Microsoft Access to deploy your databases.
Consideration UI Builder Solution
Users only have visibility to the forms, reports, and queries you present to them. They are only able to modify data stored in the database. This means users need a strong menu interface that offers all the functionality necessary for them to carry out their work. UI Builder’s intuitive menu interface can be easily configured to display the forms, reports, and queries your users need. Each menu and submenu button can carry out more than 25 different commands. Moreover, you can change the menu commands, display layouts, and color schemes even when in Access runtime mode.
Macro and Visual Basic coding must have solid error handling to prevent the Access runtime version from shutting down. The Access runtime version will close on unhandled errors. The features in UI Builder is pre-packaged and fully tested, which means you only have to worry about testing the small number of macros or functions you create yourself.
Advanced troubleshooting tools are highly important to identify the source of problems in an Access runtime database. UI Builder’s event logging and alerts help you isolate potential causes for error in your database, even if you are far away from the user’s PC. Rather than attempt to reproduce their setup and debug with a full version of Access on their machine, you can view the event log to identify where the application is encountering difficulty.
 

ADDITIONAL BENEFITS

Employing runtime versions of Access in your business can have some additional benefits that are important to evaluate: Control user access to objects By using the runtime version of Access, your users will not have the ability to open the Microsoft Access database window, or gain access to forms, queries, reports, and other objects you may not want them to open, delete, or modify. Limit the ability to extract data In cases where you are not eager to have data readily extracted from your Access database into an Excel file or other output that might get into the wrong hands, the runtime version can help limit a user’s ability to do so. Because the Import/Export capability is not included I the runtime version, the user would need to print numerous pages of data, or find ways to access your database via ODBC.

CONCLUSION

Depending on your organization’s size, you can save literally thousands of dollars in unneeded Microsoft Access licenses, while still enabling employees to benefit from the efficiency gains many Access databases offer. When evaluating how much you can save, and the steps needed to migrate users to the runtime version of Access, leveraging off-the-shelf tools like UI Builder for Access can reduce your time to savings, and ensure your runtime database solutions are reliable and easy to manage.

 

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