Thursday 7 February 2008

Microsoft Access for Workgroups

I've occasionally had a vague ambition of setting up a multi-user database environment that's as easy to use for database newbies as Microsoft Access. The problem is that supporting multiple simultaneous users immediately multiplies the complexity of software much more than you'd think. Besides the creation and management of user accounts (and someone to reset passwords when the users forget them), you've got to have security policies on the data and make sure that people editing the same data at the same time don't cause problems for each other. So any software like this would have to come with all that user management functionality built in, not just in the basic system but for every new database. At this point, I tend to focus on something else.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This leaves out the point that Access is still too hard for most newbies.
PPS - There's a learning gap between spreadsheets and databases that needs to be filled.

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