Introducing Access 12
Hello! I’m Erik Rucker, and I’m the Group Program Manager for Microsoft Access. I’ll be using this blog to share details about the upcoming version of Access, which we’re currently referring to as “Access 12”. I’ll be working with other folks on the Access team on these posts, and so in addition to the product you’ll get a chance to meet some of the people who are building it.
The development team for Access 12 is about 7 times as large as the one for Access 2003, and this has allowed us to do a lot of work we’ve wanted to do for a long time. Our goals for Access 12 are to make new users more successful, to make existing users more productive, and to enable a whole new type of database application built around Windows SharePoint Services. Access today is quite successful by almost any standard, but you don’t have to look far to see that there are lots of unmet data tracking needs in the world. In customer research for research Access 12 we saw a lot of people who needed a database, and a lot of frightening solutions that didn't involve one. Like the guy who kept all important issues on post-it notes until he was done, then tossed the post-its in a drawer in case he ever needed to go back. Can you imagine trying to find something from 3 months ago in that drawer?
With Access 12, the post-it guy will be able to fire up Access, select a fully functional Issue Tracking application from a new “Getting Started” page, and immediately start managing his issues. And yes, he “had issues”. No authoring required. If he wanted to start from scratch or take an issues list from Excel as a starting point, he’d be able to do that by simply typing (or pasting) into an Excel-like grid. Extending the application by adding new columns, forms, or reports is equally easy. He can then create forms and reports with a single click, and edit them in a WYSIWYG design surface far more easily than they could in Access 2003.
Existing users and developers will find a wide range of new tools to help them build their apps more quickly. Imagine the developer called in to help post-it guy. She probably won’t start from the template, but the WYSIWYG designers described above will help her create forms and reports from scratch much more quickly than she can today. Of course the existing designers are still there as well, so if she likes the current model for some tasks, it is one click away. She can use Access’s macro language to write sandboxed code, so she can deploy her solution without having to sign it. She can even make it simple for others to assign issues to the post-it guy through emailed forms that automatically upload their data to Access when they’re returned to his mailbox.
In addition to being unwieldy, the post-it solution is really single user. Sure, he could pass a note to a co-worker, but he could never track what happened to it. Access 12 can take the issue tracking application mentioned above, and easily share the data on SharePoint. The data is stored in SharePoint lists, and the Access UI connected to those lists through SharePoint’s web service. Now multiple users can collaborate on the list of issues using Access’s rich UI, or even the SharePoint browser UI. When it is running on SharePoint, the issue tracking application uses server-side workflow to do notify users when they have issues assigned to them, to manage issue resolution and so on. For the application user, this stuff just happens, but a developer can now build a whole new type of rich client / rich server collaborative apps, powered by workflow on SharePoint, and integrated with Outlook.
In the next post, I’ll talk about Access’s new database engine. We’re very excited about this, in large part because it is pretty much exactly the same as our existing database engine. The difference? We own it now and can extend it. Access has always used the “JET” database engine (would you believe that’s an acronym? bonus points to readers who know what it stands for…). JET is owned by the SQL Server team and ships as part of Windows. Access 12 will come with a “privatized” copy of JET that now supports new data types, has improved performance, and better stability. And we can provide a confident future for JET-base applications when SQL Server is slowing development in JET. And it is fully backwards compatible, so existing solutions will run unchanged. Like I say, it’s pretty much exactly the same, except better, and we’re really excited about that.
