What kinds of problems have there been using Access databases with SharePoint?

Question

Just curious what the experience has been in uploading MS Access tables to SharePoint 2007 list. We've been planning on doing so, but I seem to recall issues with SharePoint mangling Access tables in the resulting lists and generally the migrations not going so well. Your experiences? Best practices and recommendations? I'm particularly concerned on its ability to migrate forms and reports as well if it can do so. Thanks!

Answer 1

As mentioned, the big news for Access 2010 is we can build web sites and publish applications to the web. Here is a video of me running ms-access in a browser (the 1st part is in the client, but you clearly see me switch to the browser version of the application about ½ into the video):

www.members.shaw.ca/MrTurtle/2010d1/w1.html

For access 2010 the tables (or so called lists) are going to have things like cascade deletes, cascade delete restrict. There also again a whole bunch of performance improvements that will allow much larger list sizes to perform well.

Note that the new table triggers (data macros) will also go up to SharePoint when you publish the database.

For access 2007, there is not really any particular special problems, but there is just more limitations compared to the next version of access that is coming out. So for example if you need to link up a whole bunch of related tables you have in 2007, when you push the tables up to sharepoint, you don’t have any cascade deletes or any RI options like you’ll have in access 2010.

So I don’t recommend pushing up an application with a whole bunch of interrelated tables. It just not going to work. However, if you have a simple customer list or contact list of a few thousand names that you need to share, then access 2007 should work just fine for you.

So, keep in mind if you have a list or table you need to share, then fine. However, you not going to have any luck or success if you have a whole bunch of tables that are interrelated, and you need to run the application in that fashion.

Answer 2

In response to a question from UK SharePoint User Group I wrote a blog post on Using Access 2007 with SharePoint lists which you might find interesting (some interesting comments too).

There is no facility to migrate forms or reports in Access 2007/SharePoint 2007, only tables. Lots of new stuff in Access 2010/SharePoint 2010 which will allow you to create Access Web databases for SharePoint.

Derek