Compatibility meter - Share point 2007 and MS Access 2007

I was on this engagement where I had to make use of management information stored in MS Access 2007 and MS Excel 2007 in a share point 2007 site.

It’s been 150 years since I used Access to do some basic database management stuff in a small library management application and here was with some data in access, some in excel and a share point site.

If it was not for the OOTB features of Access 2007 for integration with share point 2007, the same set of tasks would have taken ages or lots of custom coding but I didn’t have to do anything other than some cool OOTB features of Access 2007 to actually make things work.

Some of these features are –

Linked tables – This is a nice feature and has been with Access since quite a long time now. Linked tables allow Access to have a table directly linked to a share point site. This allows updating the sharepoint list by just updating the Access table. This helps user who are comfortable using Access to just use it and in turn update the corresponding share point lists.

Appeding data from an excel file to a sharepoint list - The OOTB excel import feature of sharepoint allows to create a new list on the basis of an excel file but there Is no OOTB feature to append rows of data from excel to a share point list.

Access 2007 comes to help here. An excel file can be imported into an Access 2007 table. This feature allows to create a new Access 2007 table based on an excel file and also allows to append rows from an excel file to an Access table.

If you read the paragraph above and replace "table" with a "linked table", you have got a way to append excel rows to a share point list. Interesting huhhhh J.

Similarly there are many features in Access 2007 that allows it to integrate with sharepoint 2007. Look closely, you might be able to implement lots of your requirements using these OOTB features.