Sharepoint 2013 : Developing Applications with Access (part 1) - Exploring Access 2013

Access 2013 offers a significant level of empowerment to business users and SMEs without requiring the services of a developer. With Access 2013 an end user can:

• Create new web applications using predeveloped templates.
• Download existing web applications from the public or corporate app store.
• Develop custom web applications from scratch.
• Rely on desktop database applications that require all other users to have Microsoft Access installed as well.

To add an app to any SharePoint 2013 site from the public app store or the private corporate store, simply click the settings icon in the top-right corner of the screen, and click Add an App from the drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 1. The list of available apps includes a number of prebuilt apps, built-in customizable templates, and customizable templates available on Microsoft.com, such as the Customer Billing and Time Tracking app shown in Figure 2. After an app has been installed to a SharePoint site, that particular instance of the template web app can be easily customized and extended with the Access 2013 client.

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

Creating Access web apps requires either Office 365 (Small Business Premium or Enterprise editions) or SharePoint 2013. If neither is available to act as a web app host, the desktop database application is the only option available. One benefit unique to desktop database applications is that these are the only Access applications that leverage Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to extend functionality.

Exploring Access 2013

Opening Access 2013 is your first exposure to the revolutionary new approach to web and desktop databases. Fully three-quarters of the opening page, the Backstage view, is dedicated to easily discoverable application templates in an eye-catching, tiled screenshot interface. This instant application template discovery engine is a big improvement over Access 2010, which offered similar choices in a small, horizontally scrolling strip of categorized templates. Where Access 2010 required numerous clicks to find an application template, Access 2013 focuses on speeding the user to the task.

This task focus extends to the integrated application template search experience. The top of the screen sports a search box and a handful of suggested searches that queries installed templates and Microsoft Online. Search results can be filtered by category to instantly enhance relevance.

Searching for a template in any new Office 2013 application is instantly a cross-application experience. When a search returns, the bottom of the search results includes instant access to valid templates for other Office applications. For example, a search in Access for Employee yields 10 results for Access and 46 results for Word. Expanding the options for Word reveals a tiled list of Word template screenshots, each of which offers the opportunity to instantly jump to the more task-relevant Office application. Figure 3 shows the initial template selection screen, with easy access to other Office applications based on search results.

FIGURE 3

Immediately worth pointing out is the new emphasis on Access web applications. Default templates such as the Issue Tracker, Task Management, and Contacts default to web interfaces and offer desktop experiences as an explicitly alternative option. This is not a huge change from the previous version; Access 2010 did offer a web database option but that option was offered after the desktop experience, which implies a selection preference. The explicit reversal of that implied selection preference is just one indication as to the continuing significance of Microsoft Access to the business application developer.

Microsoft uses the vocabulary word noun to represent the template entities available from the search box. For example, should a user want to track Issues, the search experience represents Issues as a noun, but the web application has tables for Issues, Customers, Employees, and Comments. The noun is actually one of hundreds of publicly available database schema templates hosted by Microsoft.

Clicking any of the application templates provides a functional business application in 60 seconds or less. For example, the Issue Tracker application instantly creates data storage tables and data management forms for contacts and issues. The web application and desktop application offer near-feature parity, with the only major difference being the user interface for the web app is inside the browser. Otherwise, access to forms, views, tables, and automated functionality are all available in online applications and desktop applications. The most important difference between Access and other Office applications is that when a new Access application is created, a unique intermediate step requires the user to define the web application’s deployment destination as a local server or an Office 365 environment. Business and consumer users without access to SharePoint or Office 365 can leverage SkyDrive for desktop database applications but cannot create web applications.