A common challenge with custom web applications has always been customer maintainability. In most cases the admin interface is left until the last min of development when budget is short and all resources are tied up fixing bugs and making the end user experience better. Once an application goes live it's very rare to see a large commitment made to the back end admin site since the pressure is always on to make the public face better. The net result is customers need to rely on external developers...

Prior to joining the team here this summer I was a partner in a couple app development shops in Toronto ( M7 Database & Unspace ) that specialized in a software + services approach to development. We blended Access with Ruby on Rails to create better experiences for both our customers and their customers through the web. Many people I have met think the web is the be all end all and that rich client software is going away. I disagree; the web does a lot of things well like democratize content...

Some members of the Access team are going to be attending the 2008 Office Developer Conference being held in San Jose, CA from Feb 10-13. It will still be pretty early for us to be talking about the next version so most of the content will be 2007 focused, but for those who like to walk the bleeding edge of tech, we definitely plan to talk some about our Access 14 plans as well. This is a great opportunity for you to meet up with members of the product team in an informal environment where you'll...

The last couple days I have stumbled across some numbers that give you an idea about the popularity of our favorite desktop engine. 3 million hits on this blog last month 2.8 million 2007 template downloads world wide since launch Pretty cool!

The Microsoft Access team is evaluating opportunities to help application developers and consultants grow their businesses and enable an even broader distribution of custom Access applications. If you have an Access application that you sell, tell us about it. Please leave a comment or send email with the following information: What is the application scenario and why people use your application(s)? Application description (or URL). How do customers/clients find your application(s) to purchase? What...

A great opportunity has just come up for you folks to get some feedback into the Access dev process. Dany Hoter, one of our product planners who is studying the Access business, is interested in talking to Access developers to understand better the kind of solutions they create. He would also love to discuss your thoughts on the competitive landscape of data tracking and application building, especially any insights you may have on the world of web applications and services. If you are interested...

Sue and I were talking the other day about Ribbon customizations with regard to some training materials that she is preparing for our support engineers. Along the way I mentioned command repurposing and how you could do some pretty cool stuff with it in Access applications. She suggested that this might make a good blog post and I think she's right. I've been working on an application to track the work that I do throughout the year, and thought I would add a database password to encrypt the database...

Here's the overview of what's on at the UK AUG National Conference on Friday 16th November - they have tried to keep the cost down to £99 as a thank you to support over the years. Follow the link below to book online or print out a paper booking form. Access User Group National Seminar Friday 16th November 2007 Microsoft Offices, Reading The next Access User Group seminar will be on 16th of November at Microsoft's Offices in Reading. Topics include: Office 2007 Client Developer Features Martin Parry...

The Access help team has just finished up our new interactive guide for users moving from 2003 to 2007. The guide is a flash based tutorial which allows you to select a command from the 2003 Access UI, and then see where it has moved to in the 2007 ribbon.

I've recently had some questions from users who used to sort their DBC by the description field and wanted to be able to do the same thing in the 2007 navigation pane. If you use this scenario, and you've tried in 2007, you'll know that the navigation pane doesn't have a sort by the description field. One way to work around this is to create a query that does it for you. Here's a sample that lists the user Query objects in the database along with their descriptions. Note because the Description property...