Part V: Access and Windows SharePoint Services
1146
Looking at SharePoint Deployment
Options
It should come as no surprise that Microsoft provides more than one way to deploy Access applica-
tions to SharePoint. In their eagerness to encourage developers to consider SharePoint as a plat-
form for Web deployment, Microsoft suggests at least three ways to publish Access databases to
SharePoint: table exporting, enhanced table exporting, and publishing to SharePoint.Cross-Reference
Exporting Access tables to SharePoint is covered in Chapter 34, while this chapter discusses remaining options.
Enhanced table exporting option
In Chapter 33, you saw an example of the simplest of these options: exporting all the tables in an
Access 2010 application to a SharePoint site as SharePoint lists. The newly created lists were then
linked back to the Access application.Simply moving the Access tables to SharePoint resolves one of the major complaints about Access.
Moving tables into a managed application like SharePoint means that the tables are professionally
backed up, protected by SharePoint’s security system, and accessible to authorized SharePoint
users. The same protection is obtained by upsizing to SQL Server (as described in Chapter 38), but
most users are prohibited from viewing or working with the data in a SQL Server database.The second way to publish an Access database to SharePoint is using the enhanced table exporting
technique. This method duplicates the first several steps outlined in Chapter 33 but carries the
process one important step further:- Open the Chapter35.accdb example database.
The database before deployment is shown in Figure 35.1.
- Select SharePoint from the Move Data group on the Database Tools ribbon group.
Access opens the Export Tables to SharePoint Wizard (see Figure 35.2).
- Specify an existing SharePoint site to receive the tables exported from Access.
In Figure 35.2, the site is specified as http://archimedes2008/sites/Access_
Bible_Chapter35.