Sorry but the slow response to all the comments on security. I ended up out of town for most of last week and had way less time to work on this than I expected. We're finishing up a summary answer to the questions & comments and should have that posted by EOD tomorrow. I've realized I've not yet given an overview of Access 12, so after the follow-up to the security post, I'll be whipping up an overview, and we can start to look at all the new work. Thanks for your patience, and again, sorry to...

In last week’s post, I talked at a high-level about some engine-level changes we’ve made to Access. This week, I’ll talk about changes to the security model that sits on top of that engine, and crosses into the UI as well. Starting next week, I’ll be going into the UI changes and all the other new stuff we’ve done in the product. Fewer modal prompts on boot (by default) and disabled mode In Access 11 based on the configuration of the machine when a user opened a database, he or she encountered 3...

In the first Access blog post, I noted that Access 12 has a new database engine, but one derived from and very similar to the old Jet engine. There were a bunch of questions & emails about what we did, why, and what it means, and it will take me more than one post to get through everything so please be patient. In this post, I’ll cover what how the database engine fits into Access and how the new is different from Jet. In future posts, I’ll talk about the Access data security model and other...

Hello! I’m Erik Rucker, and I’m the Group Program Manager for Microsoft Access. I’ll be using this blog to share details about the upcoming version of Access, which we’re currently referring to as “Access 12”. I’ll be working with other folks on the Access team on these posts, and so in addition to the product you’ll get a chance to meet some of the people who are building it. The development team for Access 12 is about 7 times as large as the one for Access 2003, and this has allowed us to do a...