How to update/distribute Front-end Clients with Sharepoint

chuckcoleman

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I built an application for a client that had three remote sites. The Access front-end database runs on the local machines, (main location and three remote offices), and the data in the back-end is on a SharePoint list. Now, when I need to do updates on the clients front-ends, I'm wondering how best to do that. In the past in a non-SharePoint application where the customer was all in the same location and had a server, I would copy a new front-end to the server, to a specific folder, and I provided each client a little batch file that they executed that did an XCopy from the server to their local machine. Then they had a new client front-end.

This is my first experience with SharePoint and I'm wondering how I can distribute a new version of the front-end to the "HQ" location clients as well as the three remotes? It would seem to me that SharePoint has a ton of features and potentially one of them could be used. A side concern is the data in the client's front-end SharePoint tables aren't going to be in sync with the real data on the SharePoint site and I'm nervous about deleting some SharePoint site data when the front-end syncs with the SharePoint back-end.

Any advice would be appreciated. Any links to articles on this subject would also be helpful.

Thanks,

Chuck
 
Hi Chuck. This topic sounds familiar. Rather than worry about it, what happens if you just did it? I say there's nothing to worry about, but your mileage may vary.
 
I’m a little confused about your concern. If the lists are linked, then distance will not matter, the tables will synch up just fine - even if you are offline. Just be sure to use the Access 2010 cache feature.

Before going to SQL Server, I had offices in Spain, Italy and Bahrain and all three sites were able to use it with their local front ends with almost no noticeable degradation in speed.

The only real issue I had was when the list got large (20k+ records). But then I discovered how to use views and things got much better.
 
theDBguy. It's familiar because I'm still searching for answers. Sorry.
 
NauticalGent. Distance was never a concern. I'm sorry if I somehow conveyed that. And, I checked, Cache is turned on, right now I have 50k+ of records. I'm using Access 365.

To net my questions out, how do I distribute updated versions of the front-end? When I do development work on the front-end, it's tied to MY SharePoint account and not the customers. When I figure out how to distribute to my customers end-users a new updated front-end, I'll have to change in my copy, (before I give it to them), where the customers tables are located. I think I can do that by changing my new version of the front-end SharePoint tables through Linked Table Manager and then give it to them. BUT, again, at that stage, the new front-end that I give them will have embeded in it the test data from MY SharePoint account. The only thing I'm nervous about is overwriting any of the customers SharePoint data with my test data. Make sense?
 
theDBguy. It's familiar because I'm still searching for answers. Sorry.
Which is fine, but all discussions on the same topic should probably be confined to one location to avoid any confusion or duplication of effort. Good luck with your quest. Please let us know how it goes...
 
Hi, I'm no expert on this, but I have used Sharepoint instead of a fileshare to store and deploy front ends. It works because of the WebDAV capability of Sharepoint (and Box and other web repositories). You can map to them like any share drive. So your .bat file which does your XCopy - well, not sure how to make that work, but we had a little Access app which was distributed to all users. Open it up and it would map to the Sharepoint drive, show a list of .accdr files available to users (it only shows the ones they have Sharepoint permission to view, which is cool), and then when clicked it would load them and start them the same as your bat file does. The trick is to get the drive mapping working using the WebDAV capability.
 
If by "rolling" you mean horizontally in a table this idea doesn't conform to table design. If you mean some kind of form, then maybe. Are you looking for some kind of Outlook Calendar thing but created in Access?






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