Part V: Access and Windows SharePoint Services
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private LAN (local area network). SharePoint is not a general-purpose tool for building Web sites,
and SharePoint pages lack many of the features expected of public Web sites.This chapter takes a more generic look at using SharePoint data than previous chapters. The intent
of this chapter is to show how to use SharePoint as a reliable and valuable source of data for Access
applications.When linked to an Access application, SharePoint data is available to all other users of that
SharePoint site. This means that the data input by Access users at their workstations may be
viewed and updated by other users who have access to the SharePoint site. Also, you can consider
Access as a consumer of SharePoint data. Access becomes a feature-rich front-end application,
using remote SharePoint data as if the data were located locally. The user notices nothing out of
the ordinary. From the Access user’s perspective, a SharePoint-hosted Access application looks like
any other Access application and contains the same data-entry screens and reports as any other
Access database.Note
SharePoint is commonly used for intranet applications running on local area networks (LANs), rather than
across the Internet. SharePoint provides many features that aren’t needed in a pure Web context, such as sort-
ing lists and searching for keywords. Also, SharePoint pages have too many constraints on them to make
SharePoint a general-purpose Web development tool. For example, by default, SharePoint pages have a naviga-
tion panel along the left side, a menu bar across the top, and a large area to the right of the navigation panel
for the page’s main content. Although SharePoint pages can be coerced into almost any layout, the effort
required to customize a SharePoint page is considerably larger than a traditional ASP.NET page.
On the CD-ROM
This chapter uses the database named Chapter33.accdb. If you haven’t already copied this file onto your
machine from the CD, do so now. You need access to either SharePoint Server 2007 or 2010 to experiment
with the data sharing techniques described in this chapter. Earlier versions of SharePoint support limited data
sharing with Access, but do not support updating linked SharePoint lists from Access.
Introducing SharePoint as a Data Source
This chapter builds on previous chapters covering importing and exporting SharePoint lists, and
includes close integration between Access and SharePoint Web sites. This chapter demonstrates the
power and flexibility of using SharePoint data within Access applications. SharePoint data linked to
an Access application is live, and reflects changes made by users almost instantly. In reality,
SharePoint integration is one of the big stories (from Microsoft’s perspective) in Access and Office- Microsoft is busily enhancing the ability of Access and SharePoint to cooperate and share