What to upgrade Access 97 to?

[jrdr]

One of the applications we have is immensely stable, good at its purpose and really well liked by its users. It is sold commercially and customers are often long standing and prepared to pay us for support.

The problem is that it is written in Acccess97. We have never needed to upgrade it but windows 8 is a potential brick wall.

The dilemma we have is what to upgrade to? Should we use some later version of Access and if so which version is as stable as 97. Or should we look at something radically different? We are reasonably web capable as developers but the web does not feel like a good replacement for what our users expect (ie a desktop app that gets "Installed").

We have a lot of time invested in our build process and it is very slick. We use Access 97, Wise Installer, Sagekey and Finalbuilder. Using this workflow we can go from the DEVELOP version to a runtime APPLICATION version and a TRAINING version (with sample data) in 7 minutes and do this as a daily build process routinely.

As I see it our options are:

1. Stay as we are and gradually allow it to die
2. Build a non access solution
3. Find an access solution
4. Start shipping it as some kind of VM Appliance
5. ?????

I'd like to hear what others have experienced.
John

 

[boblarson]

I don't think I would say that any version has been as stable as A97. Personally, I think you would be good to go with Access 2010. 2003 is approaching full end of life in April 2014. 2007 is buggy and has a lot of annoyances. 2010 fixed a lot of what was wrong with 2007. 2013 is not as stable as 2010 at this point.

That is my view. But it could be of benefit to just use an Access backend or SQL Server Express and then build it in Visual Basic.NET or Visual C#.NET.

 

[ButtonMoon]

This feels like it ought to be driven by your product and marketing strategy rather than just being a technical question about a version upgrade. Do you know what is the future roadmap for your product? Or what features you will want to offer in future? 64bit support maybe? A client-server version?

As a software vendor if you are sticking with the Windows platform then it seems likely that .NET might be a better place to be, if only because it would give you a much wider range of options to support different architectures and different directions of development in future.