Access Services and IT pros: Impressions from TechEd 2011

Today's post is contributed by Lois Wang from the Access team.

J.R. Arredondo and I had the opportunity to be at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta last week. We had two talks: a small interactive session called ”Empowering information workers with Access,” and a big-room presentation called “Managing Access databases in your organization with SharePoint” that gathered around 120 people. I wanted to share with you some of our takeaways from discussions with the attendees.

Our sessions showed Access Services in action and centered on how to empower information workers through Access, as well as on how to manage many Access databases by using SharePoint, Office 365, and SharePoint. Many customers are telling us about the roles that Access Services plays in their investments in SharePoint and Office 365, which by the way continue on their great sales trajectory. Many IT folks came to the Office demo booth to tell us about their projects. It was great to hear that only roughly a year after the worldwide availability of SharePoint 2010, and a few months after the launch of Office 365, customers are already sharing with us their stories and experiences about using these to collaborate, organize content, do business intelligence, find information, and of course to manage and distribute Access databases to their users.

It is great to also see that people are very excited about using technologies such SQL Azure, Windows Azure, and Office 365 as part of their cloud strategy. IT pros are telling us that they continue to learn more and more about these technologies and about the opportunities and challenges that they will face as they help drive their organizations toward cloud-based services and infrastructure. Of course, many are already actively working on these projects. It was great to see the interactions between the two groups--those who are still exploring and those who are already implementing these projects. IT pros gave us the same message around applications. They have been adopting cloud-based business applications, using either SQL Azure and/or Windows Azure, or no-code apps directly within SharePoint and Office 365.

Thanks to all of you who stopped by to give us feedback about Access and Access Services 2010 and ideas for the future version of Access. We are glad to see that many of the comments are already being addressed as part of our planning for the future version of Access and Access Services. Keep this feedback coming!

--Lois Wang