Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Overcoming Obstacles

A common frustration seen over the years is this: You create a great Access-based utility for personal reasons that might be valuable to others in your organization, but no one else has an Access license. Throwing down another $150 to $300 for an Access license, or Office Professional license, may not be an option.

The solution? Take advantage of the free Access 2007 Runtime edition offered by Microsoft. The Access 2007 runtime can be installed on any Windows machine, whether it has Office installed or not. A user can open an Access database, work in the forms, update data, view reports, and run queries. There are some limitations, of course, and you need to be sure your application is fairly rock solid in terms of menus and error handling.

We've put together a little whitepaper on some of the considerations and benefits to using the Access runtime edition here:

http://www.opengatesw.net/documents/Become A Cost Hero Datasheet.pdf

And here is the link to the download of the runtime version of Access 2007