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We are planning to move from an on-premises solution to a hosted one for our office applications. Office 365 includes Access for some of its Enterprise plans (namely, E3 and E5 I think). As we are currently using Access, some doubts about migration, compatibility and needed products arise:

  • Are there still restrictions (like it used to be with VBA) for the migration of Access to cloud solutions?.
  • Which products do I need to purchase separately in order to be able to share an Access database among all the colleagues? (I have read about Access Services, but I don't know if this implies I also need Sharepoint, if sharepoint is included with Office 365 nowadays... I cannot come to a conclusion).

Hope someone cane shed some light on this as I am always afraid of Windows ecosystem limitations and extra, unexpected costs and incompatibilities...

Thanks in advance,

Jose.

kankamuso
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  • To share a mdb is complex. I wonder if Azure Remote App would be more suited for your need. – yagmoth555 Mar 03 '16 at 12:44
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    Honestly, sounds like the question you *should* be asking is "how do we get these @#$%ing Access databases out of our environment?". Migrating to a different version of Office is the perfect time to eliminate (or at least sharply reduce) this crap from your environment. – HopelessN00b Mar 03 '16 at 13:10
  • @yagmoth555 I will have a look at Azure Remote but once again, licensing, extra costs and complexity are a nightmare. HopelessN00b, you are right but... if the enviroment is based on MS Office... many times it is not an option to get rid of it :-(. – kankamuso Mar 03 '16 at 14:00
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    I'm confused. Are you asking about the license to install the full version of Access on desktops that is included with each E3 and E5 license, or are you asking about hosting databases in Sharepoint or just sharing Access files in a Sharepoint document library or OneDrive? – Todd Wilcox Mar 03 '16 at 14:17
  • I am asking about what I need in order to use everything online (despite some O365 including the desktop software). The idea is for workers to be able to access and share documents wherever they are. The thing is that I know and understand how to share word, excel and so on, but there seems to be some differences with Access that are far from my knowledge to give a final response. – kankamuso Mar 03 '16 at 14:38

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Access online is a service in SharePoint. It will allow you to create an application in Access and upload it - but it's not really Access. It takes the Access DB and converts it to SQL, SharePoint then becomes a front end to it. There is no one that tell you if that will work or not unless they have your actual Access Solutions.

That being said if you have an E3 license - this is a suite of products that include the Office Pro Plus SKU. So you can continue to use Access from the desktop applications. E3 includes access to Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync which are all hosted with Microsoft. You can spin up a trial and test importing your existing Access DB's into Access services and see if that will meet your needs.

With Remote App - you don't have to license Office 365 (but you still can and take advantage of both). If you have your own applications you can install them on your image and use them from there. It's Remote Desktop Services (RDS) hosted again by Microsoft so you don't have to manage those servers. Just be sure to check your license agreements. Nearly every MS product requires you have active Software Assurance to deploy it to a hosted service.

Jesus Shelby
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  • Actually it is really access, access has been based on SQL since 2010. The SharePoint front end is diferent but if you instead published it to a web front end you'd have a "regular" access site. SharePoint has greater flexibility than straight web published access. – Jim B Mar 24 '16 at 04:10