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Death of an old friend -- Data Access Pages

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The first project I worked on at Microsoft was Data Access Pages. I started off owning the Access/IE 5 relationship and working closely with the IE developers to make Trident a good platform for designing web apps. In Office XP I was responsible for all of the designer enhancements including multi-select, grouping drop zones, etc. Unfortunately, that work never caught on with users.

Access 2007 users can continue to run data access pages but we will not supporting creating new ones or making design changes. You would need to use Access 2003 for those activities. If you are using WSS lists the new SharePoint Designer and the native WSS authoring experience is the likely replacement for thin apps.

Looking back, I learned a lot about what it means to design great features that customers love. There were lots of great ideas in DAPs that we used in updating forms and reports--the notion of layouts was inspired by some of the tabular control movement work we designed in XP. In the end, DAPs suffered from a number of reasons:

  • The heaviness of running ActiveX in the browser
  • Lack of non IE browser support
  • Performance was always painful in comparison to forms and reports
  • Printing never came close to our report functionality
  • Writing coding was really hard
  • Confusion for users between when they user forms, reports, or DAPs
  • File couldn't be stored in the database

Over the long run our users will benefit more from the team focusing on our core competencies: forms and reports. I'm really excited about the new WSS list support, filtering, interactivity in reports, layouts make design so much easier--The list goes on and on. There are lots of cool new scenarios opening up with Access 2007.

Clint

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2006
    Very dissapointed to here that Data Access pages will not be expanded in the new Access 2007.  Where can I find more information on Wss and Share Point Designer
  • Anonymous
    April 28, 2006
    Here are a couple links to get started:
    http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/programs/designer/highlights.mspx

    http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver/highlights.mspx
  • Anonymous
    June 11, 2006
    After Clint posted Death of an old friend -- Data Access Pages, I do not feel quite as guilty that I...
  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2006
    watched the demo on sharepoint - its a full blown portal - what is the future path for sharing a simple form over the intranet to gather data? I m not going to set up a whole site for that kind of thing - does Access still deliver that role?
  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2006
    I have an application that is built (almost) totally on MS ACCESS DAP's... what will the new version have that allows me to "roll over" with the least amount of pain... or perhaps the better question is - will I STILL BE ABLE to use the DAP's I've already created?

    Also, this application runs in a peer-to-peer environment, & is basically just old-fashioned file-sharing... will I still be able to do that?
  • Anonymous
    October 02, 2006
    The comment has been removed