Access White Paper

I went to a SharePoint User Group meeting tonight.  A great presentation by visiting British trainer Craig Carpenter.

But I digress... Somehow at these events I always seem to end up mentioning Access to somebody. And, as is so often the case, the "somebody" is apparently surprised to know that Access is being used in the real world.

Well, on this occasion, I was able to refer the person to an article that was fresh in my mind.  It's the Microsoft Office Access Vision White Paper, published by Microsoft.

It's available for download as a Word document.  A couple of years old, but still a good read.

I take the liberty of quoting from the final section of the document:

Microsoft believes strongly in the strategic importance of continued investment in Access and the Access database engine. Access addresses a class of users who would never use Visual Studio and developers who can help empower and support those users. The Access database engine, with its versatile ability to connect to multiple diverse data sources and its powerful client-side query processor, fills a need that is distinct from SQL Server and SQL Server Express. Also, as a tool for creating rich Windows-based forms and reports bound to Windows SharePoint Services data, Access can add significant value to the Web-based capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services. The Web services–based technology that Access uses to connect to Windows SharePoint Services is a promising harbinger of how Access will be able to add value to other emerging service-oriented data sources. For these reasons, Microsoft sees a bright future for Access and will continue to invest strongly in its continued growth.

Nicely put, don't you think?

Technorati tags: Microsoft+Access

Real World Access (39)

One of a series of articles about where Microsoft Office Access applications have found a real-world niche.

 Bob Larson's Medical Point of Sale

Providence Health System, in Portland, Oregon, was opening a retail outlet for selling appearance items for cancer patients in one of their hospitals.

They needed a Point of Sale (POS) system in order to handle the retail transactions.  The transactions would include marking which items were covered by insurance and/or cash sales.

They found a system that the Home Medical Equipment division was implementing, but it was not going to be available for 6 months to a year.  So, they needed some program to handle the sales until such time as they could get hooked up to the Enterprise system.

Using Microsoft Access I designed, programmed, and implemented a POS system which is able to handle the cash sales, including credit cards (and tracking the bank confirmation codes), and insurance sales.

The system can submit sales invoices to the business office.  They have all the information required for billing the insurance companies.

At the time I left the company the retail outlet was successfully using the Access program I created and, if it had done the actual insurance billing, they were wishing that they could just keep using the program I created instead of the Enterprise system.

Technorati tags: POS, Microsoft+Access, Microsoft+MVP, software+development