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...

One of the Access MVPs from Canada has a great tool for helping to manage and publish Front End database apps. For those of you who are familiar with the process of front-ending, this is a real time saver, and he makes it available for free (thanks Tony!). You can pick up Auto FE Updater from here: http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/autofe.htm Tony also has a quick explanation for why front-ending is a good thing: http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/autofe/why.htm

It turns out that there was a recall class issue with one of the Access Runtime components. After we released the Access Runtime yesterday it was discovered that patches on Microsoft Update would not automatically detect and patch this component. We unfortunately had to pull down the Access Runtime download until we can ensure that all components are supportable. We are sorry for the inconvenience, and we are aiming to have it back up in a couple of weeks. If you happen to be one of the few to download...

After a long, hard effort the stars have finally aligned.  The Access Developer Extensions team is very happy to announce the release of the Access 2007 Developer Extensions and the Access 2007 Runtime.   Updated Jan 2009: Here is the latest link to the 2007 Developer Extensions http://blogs.msdn.com/access/archive/2009/01/20/access-developer-extensions-2007-updates.aspx   Here is the link for the 2007 Access Runtime: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D9AE78D9...

Sorry for the unannounced hiatus, but the Access blog is back up and rolling. I’m changing the way I come up with content and will be sharing things more broadly around the team than we’ve been before, which should lead to a more constant flow of content and a spread of interesting topics. The last few months have been spent planning the next version of Access and getting the ball rolling on that. Can’t say more about it, but the team is very excited about the plans and we’re making good progress...

For those of you who have been struggling a little with Ribbon customization in Access 2007 and miss the old world of CommandBars where you could design the command experience directly through the UI, Patrick Schmid has a cool add-in that allows you to make graphical design changes to your Ribbons from right within Office. It works with all Office apps that have the Ribbon. His tool is free to try, and he's also currently got a beta program going. You can pick up the trial here: http://pschmid.net...