Small systems & workgroups...

There are perhaps many hundreds of thousands of business applications developed using Microsoft Access, a package designed for use by single users and small workgroups. A vast range of applications can be built with this suite, from simple to highly complex. Thanks to an integrated library of software components, Access can be used to communicate with other tools in the Microsft Office suite, such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, for example.

Departmental workgroups benefit most from the use of Access. In situations where no or very little external (web) access to back-end data is required, its use in the scenarios mentioned is widespread. The back-end database engine that is part of Access is not designed to scale to the internet; other options are available for that requirement. Ideally therefore Access is used to develop small-scale applications that are internal to the organisation as a whole. Access has vast capability that can be fully exploited to achieve your departmental software goals and, if developed professionally, offers robust and highly reliable systems.

Experience...

It is fair to say that many Microsoft Access systems have been developed in-house; in many cases by 'power users' rather than fully-fledged developers. In our experience this often leads to issues when the person mainly responsible has perhaps moved on; additions/enhancements become problemmatic since there is usually no attendant documentation with which to make sense of what has been done. Additionally the system may have started out as something very simple and which worked well, but over time further work has resulted in a system that is cumbersome to maintain and enhance and may well exhibit disruptive faults and/or make efficient use of the system difficult and frustrating.