1135
CHAPTER
Understanding Access
Services
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding managed
applications
Introducing Access’s Web
publishing features
Looking at Access Services in
SharePoint 2010
Explaining the limits of Access
Web Services
A
ccess 2010 introduces a new standard for Access application devel-
opment. The new model is not quite full-blown Web development in
the sense of producing public Web sites driven by large databases,
but it does offer many new and exciting capabilities for Access developers.
For a long time, Microsoft has been emphasizing and promoting SharePoint
as a platform for collaborative development. Chapters 32 and 33 explored
some of the new and existing capabilities built into Access 2010 that enable
Access users to seamlessly share data with SharePoint users. Because
SharePoint must be hosted on a Web server and is accessible only through a
Web browser, integrating Access data with SharePoint is the first step toward
creating Access applications with a credible Web presence.
All the features and techniques described in Chapters 32 and 33 apply to
Access 2007 and 2010. But this chapter is a departure from previous discus-
sions because it is essentially a white paper on the Web capabilities built
solely into Access 2010. The features described in this chapter require Access
2010 and are incompatible with any other version of Access. Also, a com-
plete installation of SharePoint Server 2010 is required as the destination for
Access Web apps. No other version of SharePoint includes Access Services,
which is vital to these new capabilities.
Note
Although SharePoint 2010 is a requirement for migrating Access applications
to the Web, this does not mean that SharePoint must be installed on your local
network. Hundreds of service providers offer subscription-based SharePoint
services. Many of these providers provide volume-based pricing, so the client
pays less for a low-volume site and more for a site that receives a lot of hits.
Subscribing to a commercial SharePoint service provider may be the fastest
and most affordable way to host Access applications on SharePoint. The only
caveat is that the commercial service provider must offer SharePoint 2010,
and not an earlier version.