Undoubtedly, you have seen a flood of announcements coming from the Office organization today. Some of the highlights include: Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 have reached the technical preview engineering milestone. A limited number of invitation-only participants, including many nominations from the Access blog, can download Access 2010 and the other Office bits from Microsoft Connect . Office Web Applications will be available to nearly half a billion customers...

The Office 2007 public beta is availabe on the office site from this link: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx . For those that do download and check things out, please let us know what you think.

Access 2013 web apps feature a new, deep integration with SQL Server and SQL Azure. In Access 2010, when you created a web application on SharePoint, the tables in your database were stored as SharePoint lists on the site that housed the application. When you use Access 2013 to create a web app on SharePoint, Access Services will create a SQL Server or SQL Azure database that houses all of your Access objects. This new architecture increases performance and scalability; it also opens up new opportunities for SQL developers to extend and work with the data in Access apps.

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We're finally at a point in the project schedule where the bulk of work is shifting from PMs over to the engineers to get the actual work done, which means I'm going to have some free time to begin working on blog content again! On the subject of Access 14 , overall I have to say that I'm very happy with the amount of new work we're doing. This is going to be a really tremendous release enabling hordes of new kinds of apps to be built. I can't wait until we can begin to talk in more detail about...

Download Access 2010 Runtime, Access Database Engine Redistributable (office connectivity components) 2010 and Source Code Control Add-in for Access 2010 today! Access Runtime 2010 Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit, you can download the Runtime here – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=57a350cd-5250-4df6-bfd1-6ced700a6715&displaylang=en . It is currently offered in 13 languages and more languages will be offered at a later time. Read this post on features in Access...

A customer's post on TechNet brought one of my colleague's attention to an error folks are seeing after applying SP1 to 64-bit Access installations and then trying to use a wizard:

The database cannot be opened because the VBA project contained in it cannot be read. ... To open the database and delete the VBA project without creating a backup copy, click OK.

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In the last post, I gave a quick overview of SharePoint, SharePoint lists, and how Access works on SharePoint. In this version, I'll show what happens when you move an Access database to SharePoint. Publish to SharePoint Access has had a feature to "Upsize to SQL Server" for quite some time, and the "Move to SharePoint" feature in 2007 is very similar. It creates SharePoint lists for all the data, moves the data to those lists, and replaces the local tables in the database with remote tables linked...

Long before social web 2.0 applications were all the rage, a small traffic site, UtterAccess (UA), became a foundation for a community of Access users sharing ideas and building friendships. For its 10,000s of active members, UA develops careers, builds friendships, and helps them run their businesses more efficiently. In the last five years alone, UA has accumulated 555M+ hits, 120,000 members, and 1.4M posts. Clearly, UA offers something of value that drawn so many users to the community. A few...

Its been a long, long time since my last post, and I'm truly sorry to have fallen off the earth like I did. I'm re-launching the Access blog today, with a new look and a new commitment to keep the flow up. I'm finally at a point where I can dedicate most of a day each week to the blog - enough time to keep the content coming at a reasonable pace and respond to comments in a timely manner. You may wonder what on earth I've been doing for the last 2 months, and the answer is polish, polish, and polish...

There was an interesting question in one of the other posts that I thought I'd answer here to reach the broader audience: Doug said : If I export Northwind 2007 to WSS 3.0, the tables, like Customer, that contain 'Contact' type information get exported to an WSS 'Contact' content type. Very cool! Now you can view them in Outlook as a contact list. However, if I craft a table from hand with the exact same name, and the exact same fields, and export it, it is exported as a 'Custom' content type and...