Sharing Access Database

[hmongie]

Hello,

Hope someone can help me?

Here's my problem. I managed to piece together a database. Now, I would like to share it with three people. The database is on my home computer. The other two people are miles away (50 miles each direction). How can I set it up so that we all can access the same database and update, view, access and fill in forms, reports and etcs. ? I don't need too much security. The only security would be that they can't delete the entire database.

Would it be better to invest in a server that allows dial in access or DSL connection to ?
And what would give us the best data transfer rate?

The goal is just to allow people to access the database on my computer, something similar to like accessing a local network drive. My database is located on a partition named D: .


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I don't need too much security.

OUCH! NEVER walk into a data sharing project with that attitude. You will change your mind all too fast. Remote file sharing is not going to be a nice solution for you. Internet solutions will become a pain.

If you can afford it, dial-in access might work but I think you need to run something like Win2K or WinXP Server, not Workstation versions. The problem is that Access activity over a dail-up modem will be slower than thick molasses in a north Alaskan winter. Look into the cost of setting up your system to be a Citrix server and having your friends become Citrix clients. That might give you some performance. But that won't be cheap, either. On the other hand, it will afford you adequate security.

You might look into the topic of Design Master and data reconciliation between Design Replicas, then export your new transactions to a spreadsheet that you can e-mail to your friends. That might be cheaper, if slower, than any true on-line solution.

 

[monkeytunes]

This might be a bit off-topic, but ReAn gave me some good tips for sharing databases in this thread. The second post in the thread is the informative one (the rest of the thread gets into a discussion of enterprise level RDBMS). If you're web-savvy, an ASP front-end might be the way to go.