PDC Remarks: Steven Sinofsky on Access 12
From https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/ssinofsky/09-14PDC2005.mspx:
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I've got one more act in our demo, and I would like to show you one of my all time favorite tools, which is Microsoft Access, and talk to you a little bit about how we've gone and really re-upped our commitment to Access, and really done a lot of work to breath some new and exciting features into the product. You know, historically, Access has been one of the key tools in the Office developer arsenal. And really the core element of Access that really helped all the time was, Access is really is your landing pad for data. And so Access was one tool that you could pull data from all over the place, whether it was a text file, or a .csv, XML in the last couple of releases, an Excel spreadsheet, old legacy .dbf files, line of business client server, SQL kind of applications. And so what we've done with the new Access in Office "12" is, first, we've built in a number of very rich templates. Now, these templates represent the kind of applications that developers have historically written in Access, and enable you, the developer, to customize them and develop on top of them. And these are rich applications that one of the cool things they do is, they don't just store the data in an .mdb file, these applications also work with data stored on a SharePoint server.
So, let's take a look at how that works. I'm going to open up this application and, in fact, I'm going to go to a SharePoint site and pull up that application. And so, here it is in SharePoint. I'm actually going to show you all of the lists that have been created by using Access to create this application. I've got issues, I've got all of the tasks, I've got the contacts. In fact, when I get over to the issues list, you see I'm using the SharePoint user interface to get to the data that was created with Access, so you've go the Web UI working with this data. Here are all the issues, actually they look just like these two issues here. In fact, if I go here and change the status, and then I go over here and refresh this one, you'll see that that status just changed to resolved as well. So, that data is connected between Access and SharePoint. In fact, it's really just external data within Access. I could go here and import the data, I have a SharePoint list, that icon is not finished yet, where I can go and pick the server that I want to take the data from. Once I've got the server, I can pick which list I want to connect to. And so those external data sources are first class elements of the Access application.
So, if you want to go and connect data from multiple SharePoint sites, or from a SharePoint site and a line of business system, and build a rich application around that, we're able to go ahead and do that super, super easily. And it's actually very rich functionality for doing that.
One of the other things that you can do with SharePoint is, really, you want to take this access database, and one of the biggest problems that we've had with Access over the years is, you set up these great applications and a great database, and you can't make it easy for people to get information into the Access database.
And so we've talked all about the rich use of InfoPath as a way to collect data that's validated, that's backed up with an XML schema. We're actually going to go here and click on this Create E-Mail button. This Create E-Mail button is going to create a mail merge, but instead of a mail merge that uses the database, it's going to create a mail merge that can fill the database. And so, I'm going to go here, and I can use an HTML form, or an InfoPath form. I'm going to collect some new information, and now I'm going to choose which fields I would like to collect. I can just go and pick on any one of them, and those fields are going to be part of the mail message. And so, this is going to be a mail message that will allow me to go ahead and collect the information. I'm going to enter the e-mail addresses from Outlook. Actually, if you had an e-mail address field in this data, you could automatically go and collect the information and update it based on who had submitted it, for example, as an e-mail. Go ahead and click Create.
Now, we're going to get an Outlook mail, and it's going to show up with all of the richness of it. I'm going to send this mail to a friend of mine, and you see here is all the forms, and it will be editable, and include the form there. Go ahead and send this message.
Now, the neat thing is, I'm going to go into Outlook. Now, I sent this message out to my friend, but I'm going to go here into "Sent Items," and open up this form. This is what it would look like to receive that message, then click open the form. Now, here I am in Access, and I'm actually going to go fill this out, and I can pick the forms. You see I'm in InfoPath basically filling out the forms. Outlook "12" includes the functionality to basically use an InfoPath form as a mail merge. So, you could send around a mail message that has all the rich data collection with InfoPath and then have that data funnel back to whatever data source you want. I'm going to go ahead and click submit, and send that information in.
And so now that information is gone and sent, and you can see it's in my sent mail. In fact, that information shows up automatically in a folder in the in-box of the person who sent it. So, remember, I previously sent that mail. And so actually it will automatically, if I've enabled this feature, it will automatically process the form, and then go and add it to the database. And I actually forgot if I went and added it or not, but if I didn't I apologize. And there you have the form added automatically to the Access database, and the neat thing is, if I go here, there you see also added to that Access database as well.
And so, what I've done is created a way to submit data to an Access application from within Access, but the data itself is actually stored out there on SharePoint. And so we've done a rich connection between Access as a development tool, and the ability to connect and integrate with data that's stored out on the SharePoint site.
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Of course, the common thread of this article is SharePoint, so don't be mislead in thinking that's all Access 12 will offer.