Access 2013 multiple user via Skydrive?

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I am aware of not being able to allow 3 users access to an Access database via SkyDrive. Is there a method that will work to have 3 users share an Access file using some cloud service? I’m not sure if Office 365 will do this, and if it does, what must I know about logins, etc.?

Allan

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Hi,

Access was not meant for that. Working over a local network can be slow enough. let alone the internet. If you really need to do it with Access, I would say a web application should do it. Of course, now with multiple possibilities to run Virtual Machines everywhere, you could get a small VM running Windows Server on Azure or Amazon Web Services and have all users remote connecting to it. It could cost you from $15 to $70 / month, though.

Of course, I am admitting that by sharing you really mean Accessing the database at the same time. As an alternative, I suppose you could always get a SQL Server backend and share the front end between the users that need to access it. This would probably be doable, but also likely not the best scenario performance wise. The development of the Access based application would also need to be somewhat different from what you do with a database meant for “local” use.

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I can put the back end on my SkyDrive (front end on my PC) and it works fine (it’s a small database). My problem is allowing other users to connect their front end to my SkyDrive back end. I have read where SkyDrive Pro can allow this, but I have not seen any info on linking a back end. Oh well, another problem to solve. Thanks for the reply.

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I can put the back end on my SkyDrive (front end on my PC) and it works fine (it’s a small database). My problem is allowing other users to connect their front end to my SkyDrive back end. I have read where SkyDrive Pro can allow this, but I have not seen any info on linking a back end. Oh well, another problem to solve. Thanks for the reply.

I really think you would have performance issues, even if you could find a way to do it (which I have not investigated). With multiple users, the scenario would be worse.

Just out of curiosity, do you link the front end to the SkyDrive folder created in your local disk by the SkyDrive app, or do you use any other way?

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As others will doubtless read this thread, a word of warning.

Skydrive, like other “cloud” services, is single user. If you link your Access front-end to a back-end file in your SkyDrive folder you are running a local single user instance. Periodically Skydrive will attempt to synch your local back end file to the cloud. It looks as if you have a great solution, it is fast and you can access the back end from other PCs

If you allow anyone else simultaneous access to your cloud files they too will synch their updated local copies of the back-end to the cloud. BANG! your updates are gone. Their back-end file has overwritten yours. With Pro versions of some cloud systems you get a slightly better result, your colleagues update is rejected because the cloud file has changed since he downloaded it and he is prompted to re-do his updates.

This warning is the product of bitter experience!

Ian.

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As several members have noted, putting an Access database on the web presents some challenges. However, under some circumstances, you may find that a “Hybrid” approach where you use Office 365 and linking to tables in SQL Server Azure may give you acceptable performance, if not quite what you would get on a local LAN. The blog Yes we can get there from here describes the approach and an experiment conducted by Grover Park George. I have also seen a couple of demos, one by an Access team member, and one by Allison Balter that achieved suitable performance. The bottom line is that any queries or views need to return as few records as possible. I have not run across anyone using this approach in a large production scale environment, but the demos suggest that it seems doable.

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