I would say use caution in joining the two Access and SharePoint. There are a lot of things you can do in Access quickly that can not easily be done in SharePoint. We have a copy of the data from a list in SharePoint being mirrored to MS Access. The danger is that if you delete a record or change a record in Access it can and usually does affect the record set in SP. That said, we encourage all of our users to input data into SharePoint and limit the views they can have and edit rights. (I am sure you know this). What we do is just make a "copy" of the SharePoint list and export it into Access. What you will find is that Access will NOT be normalized and that if you have look up or rather Choice type fields in SharePoint that the look up values are stored in the LookUp property of the field in Access, where ideally you would have a normalized table set in Access for looking up values. The Dog should wag the tail, not the other way around. As a best practice, consider using SharePoint as your system of record. Follow it in Access by going to a view in a List, and exporting the View into Access by selecting Actions / Open With Access. Store the Access DB where the common user can't get to it. You as the administrator can then form queries in Access quickly to give you information that you don't have stored in a "View" in SP. One other note, when you decide to add fields in SharePoint, other drop down lists, Date Fields etc. Open Access (the one copy you made) and right click on the table name and select Refresh. This should bring the new columns into Access nicely.
"The Dog" is SharePoint, "The Tail is Access". The two work well together...but caution caution caution is advised. Hope this helps...
As far hosting solutions go, there are tons of them out there. Hope I did not go too far...
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Access on Sharepoint
02-03-12, 19:34
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