• Sidebar: Jet Engine Lives On

With the next version of Access, code-named Access 12 and expected in late 2006, Microsoft will continue to move the Office suite's database product beyond desktop databases, its traditional stronghold, into applications for group collaboration, such as tracking problems during projects. Planned features could make Access a better development platform for collaborative applications that use e-mail and the Web, although Access will have to fight for developer mindshare against a large set of overlapping offerings.

Access initially was a platform for stand-alone desktop databases (e.g., for tracking office equipment) for both professional developers and power users. The Access group believes the product remains relevant even though organizations are relying less on desktop databases and more on centralized databases and portals. In particular, Access still has a unique ability to pull together tabular data from diverse sources, including text files, spreadsheets, and relational databases. Access also has approachable designers for forms and reports, which Microsoft believes it can further simplify to reach more users.

New Features for WSS, Outlook E-Mail

Access 12 will add new features for collecting data from two important sources for collaboration: the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 12 portal and document management service, and Outlook 12 e-mail.

WSS list integration. Access 12 will include new features for importing, exporting, and synchronizing data with WSS lists, which store data such as contact lists, task lists, calendars, and document properties. WSS is Microsoft's primary platform for portals and group collaboration and is becoming the Web-based interface to other Microsoft products, such as Project Server and the Navision enterprise resource planning suite. Access 12 will enable users to work with data from WSS lists while disconnected from WSS, a valuable capability for mobile users and one that WSS does not support today. Access developers will be able to create client applications that work with WSS lists. For example, Access 12 will include a sample issue-tracking application that uses WSS to store lists of outstanding problems (such as bugs in a development project or customer complaints) and their status. Access 2003 has some ability to work with WSS lists (through a linked table feature), but can't support complex WSS lists, such as hierarchical lists in which list item fields can contain multiple values.

E-mail forms generation and processing. Access 12 will include a new mail-merge feature that generates Outlook 12 e-mail forms from a database table, and automatically updates the table from e-mail responses. The feature will be valuable for collecting and updating information (e.g., employee surveys) from workgroups. The generated Outlook 12 forms can be either InfoPath 12 or HTML.

Other planned features include new forms and report designers intended to provide true "what you see is what you get" design, which could make them accessible to more users, and support for Access add-ins and task panes created with managed languages, such as C# and VB.NET, rather than the aging Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Along with the new features, developers will get an updated database engine that is now maintained by the Access team. (See the sidebar "Jet Engine Lives On".)

One More Horse in a Crowded Race

Access 12 won't be Microsoft's first attempt to reposition its popular database product beyond the desktop. Access 2000, for example, was promoted for Web-based collaborative applications based on SQL Server. (Microsoft even delivered an issue-tracking sample application with the Access Workflow Designer toolkit.)

This time around, the target space for Access is smaller, and the competition for the space is tougher. Organizations are increasingly integrating data sources for centrally managed portals and Web services, making Access' ability to integrate data at the client less relevant than formerly. And Access is competing for developers and users with more overlapping Microsoft products than before, including the SQL Server 2005 Report Builder (end user report design for server-based data sources), InfoPath (end user forms design), the Information Bridge Framework (Office-based custom client applications accessing Web services), and the Visual Studio Tools for Office (Office-based custom client applications). To expand its audience, Access 12 will have to deliver real improvements in usability to reach less-sophisticated users than its current fans, and it will have to appeal more effectively to smaller organizations that still need client-based data integration.

Access 12 plans are outlined in the blog of Microsoft Group Program Manager Erik Rucker, blogs.msdn.com/access/default.aspx.

Access 2003 developer technology was summarized in "Access in Transition" on page 21 of the Oct. 2003 Update.

InfoPath 12 and other forms platforms were summarized in "InfoPath 12 Headed for the Web" on page 17 of the Sept. 2005 Update.