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Recently our friends over in Office Live have had major announcements about both the Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business products. Office Live Workspace announced global availability last Tuesday. It allows you to store your files and documents online and share them with others. In February, Office Live Small Business announced a major upgrade. It allows small businesses to build and maintain a web-site, market via e-mail and search engines and manage projects online. Here's a great New York Times article about the announcement.
It's exciting to see such excellent work coming out of these teams. Over on the Office Live Community site (blogs and forums for the Workspace product), I've recently fielded a bunch of questions from folks asking how they can integrate Office Live Workspace with Access.
Unfortunately, integration between Access and Office Live Workspace is not possible today.
But there is a really nice integration between Access 2007 and Office Live Small Business product. You can create an Access 2007 application which stores all its data in linked tables that live on an Office Live Small Business site. These linked tables are available from any computer with an Internet connection. You don't have to worry about firewalls, and you don't have to worry about setting up your own server or paying a separate hosting company to do it for you. By the way, this is all free, too.
One quick caveat: This is not the service to try with your million-row application. If you've got an application with < 2000 rows, performance will be zippy. Much above that and you may run into slow-downs.
Hint: You can improve performance by selecting "Work Offline" from the menu in the lower-right hand corner of the Access window once you've published an application.
Without further ado, I'd like to provide some step-by-step instructions for integrating Office Live Small Business and Access. What we're going to do here is sign up for Office Live Small Business, create a custom "business application" to host the data, publish the data up to the custom business application, and publish the ACCDB database up to a document workspace so that all your forms, reports, queries and macros are also available from any computer connected to the Internet.
If you already have an Office Live Small Business account, skip step 1.
To find out about a company that's integrating Office Live Small Business and Access 2007 into its standard offering to customers, see Clint's blog post about Cool As Ice.
Please send us feedback. Are you interested in using the Internet as a place to store your Access data? How would you, or your customers, find benefit in this scenario? How can we make it more useful?
Thanks, -- Steve
Comments: (19) Collapse
I followed these instructions and setup a Sharepoint list based on a local database - though Access 2007 crashed after completing the upload. I managed also to link a local ACCDB to the Office Live lists. My question is how do you build a browser-based UI and connect it to the Office Live data?
Hi Tony, Unfortunately there's currently no way to build a browser-based UI and connect it to Office Live data. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you're trying to do? Feel free to leave another comment or use the email link in the upper-right hand corner of the blog. As for the crash, I'm sorry to hear about that. I can look into the issue a bit. Do you know how to use the Event Viewer in Windows? You should see two events in the Application Event log corresponding to your crash. One is event 1000. The other is event 1001. It would be great if you could get me the details of these two events. Thanks, -- Steve
How do you do this with a frontend backend setup. Do you copy just the FE and itwilluse the linked BE?
Thanks, this should be great
Zave Rudman
Hi Zave, You could do this a couple of ways. If you just wanted a way to distribute the FE over the Internet, you could just save the FE ACCDB up to a document library on Office Live. This isn't that different from pushing it up to any other Internet-accessible site or share. The machine running the FE would still require access to the machine that has the BE on it. If your BE is exclusively used as a place for data and contains NO other logic, you might consider instead publishing up the BE to Office Live. What this would do is to copy all of the data from the BE into Office Live lists. Once you've done this, you really don't have a need for the BE any more. Office Live effectively becomes your BE. And it's Internet-facing. Which is the big benefit. You'd want to rewire the FE to talk to Office Live instead of talking to the BE. This is done via the Import Wizard. Remember to select the "Link" option. If you're running a FE/BE system, my suspicion is that your BE database probably has more than 2000 rows. If so, you may find that the performance of Office Live is too slow for you. Let me know if you have more questions. Thanks, -- Steve
How does one link to a list on Office Live Small Business as opposed to using a document library?
Thanks Steve for your response on my post. > As for the crash... would be great if you could
> get me the details of these two events. I will email the error logs to you, so as not to clutter the blog. > Unfortunately there's currently no way to build a
> browser-based UI and connect it to Office Live
> data. Can you tell me a little bit more about what
> you're trying to do? Well, I am trying to find an easier way to deploy Access databases to the Web. I develop databases and add-ins for developers and small business, and it seems to me there is a crying need for simpler intranet solutions for smaller business networks, viz: leverage the ubiquity of Access databases into the simple deployment of apps to a web browser, where the business owner does not need to delve into the murky world of ASP, ASP.NET, and Web servers. Basically, why can't there be a local application service that creates an HTML-based intranet solution from an Access database that runs off a vanilla local network server, and allows uses to not only to read but edit data?
Whats required for the user of my database that I move to Office Live? Do they have to have a passport, msn, or hotmail login created? If they don't have Office 2007, is it possible to use Office Live with a run-time version of Access 2007?
Thanks for the info. About the 2000 row limit, that is an issue. Can I do thefollowing: Not all the info needs to be on line. In addition it does not need to be live- just visible without the ability to edit the tables. So can I set up a way to automatically push the BE updated to the Web each night so that info is there?
This is looking good - Access seems to have a future again but it can only be a successful Internet database if we can transmit data in an encrypted form - do you have plans to add this in? Will you be offering https?
This does sound like it is finally taking Access in the right direction. I have the exact same needs as Tony, My clients are screaming for Online solutions and I am now getting bogged down in half baked MySQL / PHP and god knows what else solutions to provide partial web interfaces to my applications. Please keep this thread of development up. I know people may flame me for this comment but... I think your were heading in the right direction with Data Access pages. It was just...
A: Way before its time (technology wise)
B: You never finished it! It tried to fix it
C: It was way to ActiveX/IE dependent to be useful Basically it was useless! ... But it had such promise! Go back, re-visit it and with all the AJAX /Web 2.0, Software as a Service technology at your disposal now, you could actually do the concept justice this time. Just My 2 cents Bruce
Thanks, Steve, for the great information and presentation thereof. I am excited to know about the possibility of this functionality. However, I must confess that at this stage I am scratching my head to think of an example of where I or my clients would actually use it for real production scenario.
Hi Isaac, You can link to list on Office Live Small Business the same way you link to a list on SharePoint. Go to the "External Data" tab, click "SharePoint List" within the "Import" chunk. Let me know if that doesn't get you where you need to be. Thanks, -- Steve
Hey John, A Passport (or "Live ID" as it's now called) is required for access to the Office Live Small Business site. The run time version of Access 2007 should work fine against Office Live. Thanks, -- Steve
Hi Zave, I'm pretty sure you could get what you're looking for. The main thing to remember is that from Access' perspective, Office Live Small Business is basically "just another SharePoint site". So anything you can do with SharePoint, you can do with Office Live.
Raymond, You can turn on SSL (HTTPS) for all of the business applications on your site. Just go to Business Applications Site Settings and select "Enforce Secure Connections".
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