Niche or Mainstream Access ~ Is this the magic pill

“A Magic Pill for MSAccess”

After reading Gary's last article on MSAccess and IT departments I was compelled to write this article. Why do IT departments hate MSAccess, here are a few reasons from my experience :

1 Slows even with a few concurrent users
2 Chews up network bandwidth
3 Does not work well over a wireless network
4 The slowest computer decreases performance of all users
5 Corrupted databases are mainly caused by network failure.

The magic pill, remote desktop. Using solutions such as Terminal Services and Winconnect will give life to your MSAccess application that was simply not achievable before. How do I know, this is our preferred recommendation for all companies that purchase our product. We sell a mission critical application for the fashion industry, it runs their entire business and is written entirely in MSAccess. Our target market is 1 to 30 users , we have been criticized for not moving it to SQL and .Net but with a RAD development environment and a feature set other applications would die for, MSAccess is the right product for us.

How does it work: Using a product such as Terminal Services allows users to connect to a single box which holds and runs the MSAccess application. Users use a RDP connection to connect to the box, login to a windows desktop and use the application like any other application. In fact the box is a windows box with all your normal software applications installed (licensing applies).

Performance increases and corruption decreases simply because you have now removed the network component from the equation. Even if the connection is lost, you have not terminated your session. When you reconnect, you connect back to the same session.

Users can also connect to the box via the internet, all of sudden you can work remotely from your office. Support staff love it and your application becomes more manageable. Support and training can be done remotely, similar to products such as Nortons PC-Anywhere, where RDP work much faster. For internally used applications there is no need to ever write a browser based application.

Setting up Terminal Services and Winconnect is relatively straight forward. Most IT professionals have used it, the trick is in how to setup your MSAccess application. We have a front and back end application. When a user logs in (unique session username and password) they get a mapped local drive L: which maps to their own folder where a copy of the front end application is held. Every user has their own copy and this eliminates problems you might have with front end application settings.

Terminal Services runs on a Window Server where Winconnect runs on any Windows Operating system. The main difference is cost and security, we tend to install Terminal Services with companies over 5 users. However Winconnect will work fine up to 25 users also the cost is cheaper. Try it for USD $300 for 3 licenses it is worth experimenting on, you will be pleasantly surprised.

Peter Pakarinen heads development for Niche Fashion Technology and has been working with MSAccess since MSAccess 95. NFT uses TS extensively in its own company and that of it’s clients.


Regards
Peter Pakarinen
Niche Fashion Technology
Software for the fashion industry : POS, Retail, Management.
http://www.nichefashion.com.au