Using Access on Company Intranet

[Brent E]

Good morning,

I am curious if there is a way to easily use Access as either a model or as
a front end for a company directory on our company Intranet? I found a really
good post by searching in the archives under “Can I put an existing database
on a website?â€, and the solution was really good for remote and portable
access to a local machine from different locations, but I don’t think that
will work in our scenario.

(There may also be a quick “Off the shelf†program we could purchase that
would do this quickly and easily as well. I would be very open to that also.)
What I need to do is this.

We currently have a company intranet that we are about to roll out, but in
my opinion is sort of basic. We primarily have areas to download documents,
resource center for our company links and resources, company calendar, News
and Events, etc. But I would really like to include a company directory. I
know how to build one that will suite our needs in Access, but I’ve got a few
concerns about that:

1. I only know how to use and run an Access database on a local machine.

2. I want the directory to be web based so that all of our people may be
able to access
and use the directory w/out having Access installed on their system.

3. I know Access can tend to bog down w/ large amounts of data, or in
processing numerous requests, thus we may need to convert the directory to
some sort of Access Page front end, but use SQL, Citrix or something for the
data processing.

So I have a couple questions:
1. Is there an easy way to use Access to solve the business problem, or is
Access not the best tool in this case?

2. Does anybody know of an Off the shelf program we can purchase that can
help me build a web driven database, and that can import tables or
relationships from Access?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[dbahooker]

buy dreamweaver
and convert your data to SQL Server.

Access isn't reliable enough for a single user and a single record.

SQL Server is free.

HTH

-Aaron

 

[JLatham]

You might take a look at Microsoft's SharePoint Portal. I have heard from
many that use it that it's a good way to share within the corporation, and
I've collaborated with other companies through their SharePoint Portal setup.

 

[SusanV]

If I understand you correctly, you want to publish this via http - in which
case you either need to use ASP or Access Pages. Pages are fairly simple to
design and publish right from your existing database.

 

[dbahooker]

Sharepoint is an excellent tool.
I just don't think that it can compete with Office Web Components and
plain old ASP.

I just dont think that Sharepoint is really ready for primetime yet.
it has a lot of marketing problems.

from what i understand, Windows Sharepoint Services works great for a
low number of concurrent users.

I just thnk that count of concurrent users should be marketed as 10 or
20 instead of 5 or something.

I understand that WMSDE (datastore for WSS) has no limit on
connections; it doesnt have a real governor like normal MSDE does.

but those retards in redmond need to figure out how to make MDB write
to sharepoint in a decent amount of time.

i've always had trouble pushing 5,000 records in; even on a high-end
server with low load.

-Aaron