Web hosting

[Perfac]

We are trying to find the most effective host for our Access development. Our accounting package will be used by many customers at the same time. We searched a bit so far, and are chatting to parties including Caspio. Mweb in SA. Surely there are options that I can be informed of. Are all hosts like Caspio where we now have to recreate all forms and reports if we want to use them? Or are there hosts where we simply can copy our development to, as is? I assume that Accounting businesses like us set up a different set of books or copy of the accounting package for every separate customer.


Thank you.

[Perceptus]

One of the nicest things about access is how it lets you manage objects on bound forms and what not. That is also its downfall in the scaling it up for more connections in a WAN setup. Any situation with higher than LAN Latency is usually asking for it, unless you have designed your database with unbound forms.

I can only speak for my experience but typically In these scenario's I run the database on a TSQL system. Webservice to liason the data to the front end. the front end being an ajax based website.

Sounds like they have all that automated for you. You just need to re-work the forms. Sounds like a great deal imo.

[CJ_London]

are there hosts where we simply can copy our development to, as is

you can install access on terminal server/remote desktop or citrix servers. Either your own if you have one or via one of the sites that will rent you the space - choose one local to your clients - one based in the US will have a poorer performance for SA clients than one based in SA and visa versa.

You would install access runtime on each of your client user profiles, the front end would be in their documents folder or perhaps desktop or other user specific folder and the back end in a shared folder for that client. There is code (depending on the route you go) you can use to ensure the access app automatically starts when the client user logs in, other code to turn your app into a kiosk app so clients never get access to the server desktop and other folders and finally code to close the instance when they log out. You as administrator would need to maintain access rights to the server.

Note access runtime is free but does not provide the development facilities of full access so you need to make sure your app has full error control and provide your own versions of the ribbon, navigation window, right click menus etc. as required. You can easily check out if your app covers these matters by changing the front end file suffix to .accdr and running it.

Depending on your app, you may need to provide a licensed copy of office for each user if your app integrates with excel/word/outlook, etc

Benefit of this route is you control the environment so version control is more easily managed, you can just upload you existing app, no change other than perhaps relinking to the backend, performance will be similar to the user having the app on their local machine, you don't have to worry about wireless connections, users don't need to have windows machines - but it will come at a cost which you will need to build into your pricing structure.

Another option is to use sql azure as a backend, however from your other posts this will require a significant rewrite of your queries - use of domain functions in queries is slow anyway, but sql azure/server does not recognise them. The ODBC driver will do its best to pass what it can to the server for processing but will then pass back large datasets for processing through the domain functions - and large datasets kill performance.