Moving up - which is the best version of Access to move to?

[btidwell3]

To All,

I have a large, Access application (Access 2003) that is currently running on a Terminal Server (Windows Server 2003), with about 15 regular users logging into the application daily. The backend of the app is SQL Server 2008.



We are planning an upgrade of the entire application and environment to OS Windows Server 2012. The back end will remain SQL Server 2012. We also want to migrate to Access Runtime on the Terminal server.

My question is which version of Access should we consider for this. I want to minimize the amount of re-writing to accommodate the new Runtime environment.

We will have access to a fully-functional test environment to work through the issues that crop up.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Bill

[CJ_London]

recommend staying with 32bit access, 64bit can have problems and does not enhance performance. To minimise issues, suggest upgrade to 2010, not sure if you can easily go directly to 2013 from 2003 - others can advise. However 2010 has been superseded by 2013 and 2016, so you may just want to use 2010 as a stopping off point to get everything working then upgrade to a more current version.

You will of course still need one full version of access to be able to make changes, presumably this is your test environment. If you are moving from users having full versions of access to runtime versions, be aware that runtime will not show ribbons, menus, navigation pane etc - so you will need to write these yourself if required - my runtime clients primarily need the right click menus which also have to be created in the app - and you do need an initial form to open, either by declaring it in options or via an autoexec macro. Your error handling will also need to be in good condition - errors generated in runtime will often just close the application. You can test the runtime experience in your test environment by renaming the accdb or accde file as .accdr.

[btidwell3]

Ajax,

This impresses me as being sound advice.

The current application is 99.5% VBA, including all the error trapping, etc. I have some custom menus and toolbars, etc. The testing will reveal how well, if at all, these components are handled in the Runtime environment.

I like the plan of gradually migrating to versions later than 2010, in steps.

We are planning a development environment that will be separate from production. The dev environment will have a full version of Access installed, while production is Runtime only.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Bill T.