Access Database Cloud Site

[Mike Krailo]

Should be getting a demo of this next week, this looks real promising for those clients that must have their Access App accessible from anywhere. Of course there are service fee's involved but it looks reasonable to me. It's on a per seat basis, and depending on how you want to use it it could potentially be used for those that wish to have access to the data for read only purposes and therefore, you could still run your local network based app in house. If you choose to go all in on the cloud, it's just a matter of how many users there are and if that is an affordable option for a client. I already talked to another developer who said it operated faster than on his own network and everything worked seamlessly using one of his own apps as a test.

For 5 users it's about $1.55 per day per user, so $7.75 per day

Access Database Cloud

 

[The_Doc_Man]

There are a couple of approaches to this but the link didn't make it obvious as to which way they go.

1. You could have an RDP session where Access is run locally to the disk & system that hosts the cloud and your PC is an RDP client.

2. They have a cloud server with some sort of connection stabilization software that will support SMB protocol.

Mike, see what you can find out about how (at least in broad-brush terms) they do this. Ordinary cloud servers don't support SMB and their article SEEMS to suggest that you can have a local copy of Access, there would have to be something going on here for the protocol. I might guess some specialized device-driver software for the network OR they have something that would allow a session to be suspended and resumed after an ugly disconnect / reconnect sequence.

 

[sonic8]

I'm very sceptical if their service is in line with Microsoft RDP licensing terms.
I can't say who would be legally responsible for licensing infringements; they offering a service that allows violation of the licensing terms or you actually using a service in violation of the licensing terms. - Probably both.
IANAL and might be completely wrong here, but this aspect should be considered.

 

[Mike Krailo]

No, all the infrastructure for everything is in the cloud. Each user opens a virtual machine that has the front end on it. So all of the office products are located in the cloud. I'll know more next week. Good question about the licensing so I'll ask

 

[JMongi]

The basic team is this company https://www.justgetproductive.com/

I am VERY far from a programmer/OS expert, but I do read alot

I'd be surprised (pleasantly) if it was @The_Doc_Man's #2 thought. It seems like the SMB protocol by it's very core would be hard to make robust over a network packet system. That being said, EVENTUALLY, virtualization/emulation can be done on increasingly powerful hardware that can brute force such problems. That time frame is often much longer than we expect though. For perspective, it is still VERY intensive (top of the line, fully decked out gaming computer) to run a Nintendo GameCube emulator. The Gamecube was produced from 2001 to 2007. So, 15 years later, hardware has BARELY advanced enough to emulate this hardware.

Maybe the progress of cloud computing in general has enabled the leveraging of technology from one sector to be repurposed in this sector to allow stable SMB style connections. That has happened before (video games again!). A major advancement in medical imaging for breast cancer treatment came about because a doctor's child was getting into video game development and recognized that the tools to assist in creating 3D games could be repurposed to generate much more accurate 3D models of tumors which in turn could be used to more finely tune the levels of drugs to the estimated tumor size thus minimizing side effects and treatment length.

I like to pull out this anecdote when someone starts bashing us gamers and our useless video games

 

[The_Doc_Man]

@JMongi - my own favorite "catching up to gaming" story is a U.S. Army project to make a combat simulator using VR tech. Some years ago an Army committee was looking at how much it would cost to build a "squad training" simulation. One of the junior members piped up with "My son already plays one of those. It is called Quake II and is produced by ID Software. Costs 50$ a copy and supports up to 8 players over a networked connection, plus one machine to act as a map coordinator for the multi-player games." Shortly thereafter, the people at ID software licensed something to the Army and the military developed some specialized sensors and "guns" for it that would sync up with the game inputs. The Army was going to spend a few hundred million bucks on re-inventing this wheel until they caught up with game technology.

 

[JMongi]

That's fantastic!

 

[Mike Krailo]

Just an update on the demo our group had (about four of us), Joe Richardson pretty much answered all of our questions and it looks like this is going to be a game changer going forward. There is no licensing problem as far as I can tell because Microsoft can upgrade your current subscriptions or offer you a new one to handle your needs. The most popular option is Microsoft Office 365 Business for Enterprise ($12/mo per user). These are now your products that are installed onto the cloud machine (Windows Server 2022).

• The client can run whatever apps they want on it (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc...)
• Easily printout reports to your local printer
• Copy and paste TEXT (not files) from the web browser remote session to your local desktop seamlessly
• Drag and drop files to or from the cloud (Web Browser Only).
• Remember, each user has the 5 installs that go onto their devices: Laptop, Desktop, Mobile, Desktop2, CloudServer, etc...
• Setup lot's of security features including white list of machines allowed to connect to the server.
• They all login to the same server in the cloud either through the browser or a special RDP connection.
• Use your same split database or multiple databases with frontends on each users desktop
• No more database corruption issues due to client side faulty hardware that is hard to track down.
• The developer could simply share one of the existing accounts that the client has during development or when needed.
• The client does not have to maintain a local server anymore unless they really want to.
• The files are backed up automatically for 7 days in separate physical locations (data centers)
• For longer term backups, the admin can easily download the all backend files weekly, monthly, quarterly as desired.

The entire thing runs on a shoebox sized, state of the art piece of hardware in one of 10 datacenters around the world. It is well worth the monthly fees if your clients system has the requirement to be available remotely. This is a better option than Azure as it easier to setup (much less headaches). If you have any more questions, I suggest you schedule a demo with joe and see for yourself.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

That list is pretty much a "standard" list for a data center. The Navy center in New Orleans offered those features to its federal clients. The ONLY trick for us was that the Network Attached Storage was heavily protected by layered firewalls, so there was a rather arduous path to get connected. Once we did, we had a reliable connection over a gigabit network for which performance was good and all protocols were supported.

My main doubts have ALWAYS been that prior cloud sites didn't support SMB protocols at a decent rate. If you can get reliable SMB connections at a rate that is slightly higher than a snail race, Access would work just fine. I.e. I never doubted Access - I doubted the site. So, Mike, if this site meets the protocol/stability problems, great!

 

[JMongi]

Edit: It looks like @The_Doc_Man beat me to it.
As he said (he's the expert by far, not me), from what I've read the technical limitations weren't establishing a fault-tolerant SMB connection but that you would die from boredom or old age trying to use it on anything approaching a production environment.

I am curious as to why Microsoft 365 Business Enterprise is required as opposed to Microsoft 365 Standard (which includes Outlook/Exchange Server/OneDrive/etc i.e. the underlying networking backbone) and the free access runtime distributable.

 

[GPGeorge]

Just an update on the demo our group had (about four of us), Joe Richardson pretty much answered all of our questions and it looks like this is going to be a game changer going forward. There is no licensing problem as far as I can tell because Microsoft can upgrade your current subscriptions or offer you a new one to handle your needs. The most popular option is Microsoft Office 365 Business for Enterprise ($12/mo per user). These are now your products that are installed onto the cloud machine (Windows Server 2022).

• The client can run whatever apps they want on it (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc...)
• Easily printout reports to your local printer
• Copy and paste TEXT (not files) from the web browser remote session to your local desktop seamlessly
• Drag and drop files to or from the cloud (Web Browser Only).
• Remember, each user has the 5 installs that go onto their devices: Laptop, Desktop, Mobile, Desktop2, CloudServer, etc...
• Setup lot's of security features including white list of machines allowed to connect to the server.
• They all login to the same server in the cloud either through the browser or a special RDP connection.
• Use your same split database or multiple databases with frontends on each users desktop
• No more database corruption issues due to client side faulty hardware that is hard to track down.
• The developer could simply share one of the existing accounts that the client has during development or when needed.
• The client does not have to maintain a local server anymore unless they really want to.
• The files are backed up automatically for 7 days in separate physical locations (data centers)
• For longer term backups, the admin can easily download the all backend files weekly, monthly, quarterly as desired.

The entire thing runs on a shoebox sized, state of the art piece of hardware in one of 10 datacenters around the world. It is well worth the monthly fees if your clients system has the requirement to be available remotely. This is a better option than Azure as it easier to setup (much less headaches). If you have any more questions, I suggest you schedule a demo with joe and see for yourself.

Sounds like you're ready to move on to the next step. Keep us posted on results of your trials. It could be a highly useful alternative for the right customers.

 

[Mike Krailo]

I am curious as to why Microsoft 365 Business Enterprise is required as opposed to Microsoft 365 Standard (which includes Outlook/Exchange Server/OneDrive/etc i.e. the underlying networking backbone) and the free access runtime distributable.

That was just the most popular option used according to Joe. You can use whatever you want that won't cause a licensing issue. The runtime version of Access is also an option. If you need more details, I highly recommend setting up a demo with Joe and have all of your questions answered. He has many clients running everything running perfectly fine on the cloud infrastructure.

My main doubts have ALWAYS been that prior cloud sites didn't support SMB protocols at a decent rate. If you can get reliable SMB connections at a rate that is slightly higher than a snail race, Access would work just fine. I.e. I never doubted Access - I doubted the site. So, Mike, if this site meets the protocol/stability problems, great!

It's extremely fast, there is no crawling or slow response or anything like that. If you have a good internet connection to the cloud server, then you will be able to do productive work just as if you were doing it on your local network. The difference is that you can't just copy and paste files from the cloud to your local machine. They must be downloaded or uploaded accordingly. The browser system makes this easy since it is drag and drop. Plain text can be copied and pasted from cloud to local no problem.

If your connection drops due to faulty internet connection, when the connection is resorted, you are right back to where you left off when the disconnection occurred. This is because both the front and back end are on the cloud server. All of the apps that you want to run, run on the server and not your local machine. There is no SMB issue with this type of setup because it's all collocated (not transferring from machine to machine on the network), but you can verify that with Joe if care to enquire further. That is my understanding based on our meeting about it yesterday.

In a standard local area network setup you always traverse the layer2 network going from machine to server and back to machine. This is more like terminal server where multiple users connect to the same exact machine but the machine is in the cloud and the equipment is managed by someone else. You just rent the shoebox in the cloud.

If you wish to hide your backend from your normal users there is a handy program called Hide Folders. This is a great little app that takes care of that issue.

 

[JMongi]

This sounds a LOT like virtual desktops which has been an option for awhile but was cost prohibitive from a licensing/user standpoint (we looked into it for our needs and it was a non starter due to the monthly expense for even a limited number of users). Given their business model, it sounds like they've put a pretty wrapper on the whole thing to ease implementation. I guess it comes down to the cost of the "shoebox" rental as you say.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The difference is that you can't just copy and paste files from the cloud to your local machine. They must be downloaded or uploaded accordingly.

This is because both the front and back end are on the cloud server.

Then this IS a no-SMB environment, because copy/paste are supported by SMB protocol for Windows File Sharing. That means this is more like just a glorified CITRIX or RDP variation. And that is what Pat Hartman has touted many times when you want to remote-access Access.

 

[JMongi]

This sounds a lot like a business idea (I have lots of ideas that I'm not capable of implementing!) I thought of when I ran into the access/smb/internet issue. Someone skilled in UI/platform development could write a nice package that streamlined the CITRIX/RDP process for users like me who are reasonably technically inclined but not versed in server architecture and network protocols. There should be plenty of customers willing to pay for this functionality and ease of use.

It's a bit like the realm of bespoke NAS servers. Sure, you can roll your own with something like TrueNAS but a lot of people will like the simplicity of a something from Synology with its pretty interface that "just works".

 

[Mike Krailo]

That said, what could go wrong? Sounds like this is some kind of group thing so all your employees need to be part of the same group if you want to share Access. Can the service run SQL Server or is it just a RDP server?

This is not for me, it is for any of our clients. If they need remote access to their database then this looks like a viable solution as far as I can tell. I highly recommend asking Joe himself all the questions that you may have. Parler is not anything like Access. That was an actual website with twitter like functionality. The only thing you lose if the service goes away in the Access scenario is your ability to do so remotely. It is trivial to download your data and backend on a regular basis and whenever you want. I don't think there is nothing to fear there. Now if you are doing a full blown web service type of thing, that is whole different ball of wax.

Yes the service can host your SQL Server application on that same shoebox and be used as your backend. I forgot to mention that earlier.

I looked into this a few years ago and the hosting company wanted $40 per month per seat PLUS whatever O365 subscription you wanted. Since this is an all or nothing proposition for a small company, it was too pricy.

The pricing is listed on their website, you can check for yourself. I don't believe it is priced nearly as high as what you looked at previously. This seems reasonable to me. Please contact Joe Richardson for the exact details of what is possible depending on your needs. The O365 subscription can be upgraded from whatever they have now to the enterprise grade model as I stated earlier. It's not that bad.

From the very first post: For 5 users it's about $1.55 per day per user, so $7.75 per day

 

[JMongi]

Which for the mathematically disinclined is $46.50/month/user

The nice thing about this service is that it doesn't seem to have a lower limit. The bad thing about this service is that unless you already know how to implement a two part syncing back end (with it's own pros/cons/issues) then ALL of your users have to be subscribed to this, not just the ones that need remote access. That's based on their description that says the primary backend is located on the cloud server.

For example, depending on what would make sense for us, we would only need 13 users to have remote access. Right now we would have 19 users and in the future a couple more here at the shop that wouldn't need remote access. So, we would need to pay an extra $240 - $320/month for unneeded remote capabilities.

A quick google shows one company selling virtual (cloud) servers starting at $5/month. That may even be sufficient for our limited needs but a reasonable setup seems to start at $20/month (2 CPU, 4GB Ram, 80GB storage, 4TB bandwidth). So, you are paying for the ease of deployment/maintenance of a cloud server system. So, the question becomes, are there services out there that can manage an SQL setup for you if you (me) are not capable or able to manage the database ourselves. I'm not sure if our contracted IT company would manage a virtual server for us or how much they would charge to do so.

A quick back of napkin analysis....Our 20 user setup would be $828/month. Buying a server through our 3rd party IT company we already contract with would be roughly $12K. Their server maintenance is roughly $50/month if I recall. So, break even vs. this service is about 16 months assuming they can manage the SQL part of it too. The other way is paying for our own cloud server at $20/month. Now, how much would our IT company charge us to maintain it for us. I have a hard time believing they would charge us $800/month.

It's an interesting concept to be sure depending on ease of migration, but the costs are still pretty significant for the typical Access user (imo).

 

[Mike Krailo]

Well Pat, we just have to agree to disagree. Parler was clearly a business that was in direct competition with the so called woke twitter company and others that seen them as a threat. So unless you have that sort of business, then you have little to worry about. I don't think what AWS did should be legal to do to any company for any reason. What right do they have to just pull the plug on a business they don't like or agree with?

Every business should have a disaster plan, the most important part being to be able to remove your data quickly from the servers in question and I think that can be done in this case very quickly. Testing out parts of your disaster recovery plan on a reguIar basis and considering the consequences is a responsibility that rests solely with the business owner and partners. In the end, it mostly depends on what the business needs are and how critical the whole remote access is to everything. I believe that the Access Database Cloud site provides a viable solution to meet the remote needs of a business that requires it. At the very least, it is an option that they now have.

 

[Mike Krailo]

It's an interesting concept to be sure depending on ease of migration, but the costs are still pretty significant for the typical Access user (imo).

Good lord man, this isn't for the typical access user. It is for a business that needs remote access to their Access database and doesn't want to have the hassle of using their own server. Every business does not have the same exact needs. Your business may need more up to the second synchronization needs and another may only need that once a week. Another business might be smaller and only have five persons that even touch the database at all. Each business has to weigh the pro's and con's of using such a service. Obviously per seat means higher costs for more seats.

If you are even remotely interested in something like this, it would be much more beneficial to talk to Joe directly about exact cost breakdowns for different situations and see if it makes sense instead of relying on your napkin. Those that have their own server in house and even just use the system on the local network had better have some offsite backups. In the cloud, that issue is taken care of for you.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

This article has brought out that it is just about a new hosting center. For the U.S. Navy I was a system admin at Navy Enterprise Data Center New Orleans (NEDC NO) which used exactly the same logic and concepts.

Data centers work because for a single machine, a dedicated person (the admin) is busy maybe 25-50% of the time with actual system admin work and spends the rest of the work day trying to look busy OR wears another "hat" in the same office. I wore at least two most of the time, and sometimes three. So the Data Center concept is that one admin can cover multiple projects.

We had up to 30 admins at a time for a load that ramped up to 80 customer-clients and 1500 individual systems. Some of them were one-man shops with systems that were only used sparingly during the week and got hit hard on the weekend. Others were week-day shops. We kept the staff hopping but kept the client machines running. And we had a team concept such that if the primary admin for project A was busy, at least four more people would be listed as knowing something about the project's machines. It was a matter of "economy of scale."

The use of virtual machine systems (VMWare was most common) allowed us to dedicate a VM that was maybe 1/8th of the compute power of the VM Server rather than a whole server to a given project. So one "hardware footprint" would fully serve 8 projects. (Or more.) Therefore, the thing that @Mike Krailo is discussing is perfectly common. In fact, what do you think WE are on when using this forum? Hint: It probably isn't a stand-alone server.