Access 2010 with Sharepoint 2010
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From: David W. Fenton on 20 Nov 2009 16:03 "Albert D. Kallal" <PleaseNOOOsPAMmkallal(a)msn.com> wrote in news:sBoNm.45125$rE5.39546(a)newsfe08.iad: > "David W. Fenton" <XXXusenet(a)dfenton.com.invalid> wrote in message > > Sorry, about leaving this..I was sick for a day..and really got > behind as a result... > > however, tehre is few points to make her: > >>> Millions and millions of people use Gmail. >> >> Not real businesses, just individuals. > > Actually, there is very large number of auto dealers, equipment > sales and companies with 100's of employees that sell things on > eBay. It not just all individuals . Uh, you respond to a point about GMail with an answer about eBay? > There also popular CRM systems like sugarCrm that are cloud based. Cloud-based, or just hosted? This is one of the things that indicates to me that "cloud" is a buzzword, i.e., that it gets used for all sorts of things that have always existed. >> And I think it's a bad idea, >> since despite there "do no evil" pledge, they still have access >> to the data and can do all sorts of things they might not be >> "evil" from their point of view, but which might not align with >> the interests of their users. > > I will say that most, if not all of the cloud based offerings from > Microsoft are better than the competition in that most allow > offline mode (the purchase of grove networks was the reason for > this ability). But it was a Microsoft subsidiary that had had the most spectacular incident of losing customer data. > And, keep in mind that a significant portion of email users don't > "host" their own e-mail servers. But it is logical for email to be hosted outside your office because it's a communications platform. It is perfectly logical that services that involve communication across the Internet be hosted on the Internet rather than on your local LAN. > This is not a business solution for everything, > but do keep in mind the concept of cheap and easy and available, > it tends win in the marketplace... I'm not saying there aren't applications where it is a good solution. I'm only saying that you are overselling it. I have no clients that would benefit from moving their mainline applications to hosted solutions. The part that needs to be hosted (email, website) is already hosted. The parts that aren't don't benefit from being moved to the Internet. >>> People are not listing to the recommends not to use cloud >>> systems. >>> >>> L.A. votes to "Go Google"; pressure shifts to Google and the >>> cloud http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=26641&tag=nl.e539 >>> >>> I can get 100's of articles like the above in which county's >>> and municipalities and school districts on jumping on this >>> bandwagon. >> >> There are 1000s of articles on Web 2 and it's just a buzzword >> that most of the people using it don't really understand, and >> that at base really only describes an incremental change in >> available functionality. > > don't confuse a fundamental architecture change in our industry, > to that of buzzwords and hype Good advice. Please take it to heart, Albert. You're using "cloud" in a very loose fashion and you're claiming more for it than almost anyone I've read anywhere. You're doing the buzzword dance as hard as anyone I've encountered and it damages your credibility, in my opinion. >> Then there's all the hype about social networking and such. I >> don't recall if you specifically responded, but when I posted >> that I was trying out Twitter, it resulted in a lot of folks in >> the Access newsgroups declaring how useless it was and how they'd >> never use it. > > twitter and social networking is not a fundamental engineering > problem that our computer industry is attempting to solve by > adopting these new technologies. perhaps some of the social > networking saw the result of adoption this new technology, but at > the end of the day twitter is not an engineering solution for > access or software developers. In the period 1990-95 or so, it was all about thin clients, which was a solution to "a fundamental engineering problem" for the computer industry. It never happened (or, at least, only in a limited fashion, and not at all in the way it was originally conceived of -- we run thin client applications on fat client hardware, but the thin client hardware never really materialized). Also, the "fundamental engineering problem" you adduce is one that is much bigger a deal for large companies than for small. I don't work for big companies (I don't want to!), and so their needs are not of much interest to me. In fact, their needs and interests often make my life *worse* -- consider the butchering of Access 2000 that was almost all because of MS's desire to make Access more enterprise-friendly. Or consider the stupidity of the security warnings in Office combined with no global solution that is appropriate to anything but large businesses. When the interests of large companies drive the deveopment of the platforms from which I make my living, my life is made *harder*. Thus, you might understand my skepticism about the whole "cloud" thing. I surely see the value in the new level of Sharepoint integration in A2010 -- it's the first version of Sharepoint that I can actually see could have benefits for some of my clients. But that seems to be too small-scale for you. You're not happy with that, you seem to need to push the bigger picture, and I think you're overclaiming in that regard, and that could discredit your closely focussed comments about A2010/Sharepoint. [] >>> Google xml and web services and soap.... > >>That still doesn't tell me anything useful. Sounds like just >>another > buzzword. > > You failing to distinguish between some fad like twitter and the > underlying underpinnings of our software industry. You think Twitter is a fad? I don't. Now, maybe Twitter itself won't survive, but what Twitter represents is being integrated into all sorts of places across the web. It's becoming a service that is being embedded in all sorts of social networking and blogging sites. And that includes serious ones, like LinkedIn, not just "hobby" sites. It's one of the real platforms behind the buzzwords. You're spouting buzzwords now, when I think it would be better for you to spend your time talking about the real platforms that you see as fitting under the umbrella of the buzzwords. [] > So many said that OO was a fad. And a lot of what has been written about OO is gibberish and hype. And people still subscribe to a lot of OO-for-its-own-sake ideas, seems to me. > Today there is simply not a modern > development language right now being produced by any software > vendor that is really not an OO language. in fact I think the only > popular widespread development platform that's not OO these days > is ms-access! I don't feel we lack anything that real OO would help us with. It would just make things more complicated. OO has always looked like the emperor with no clothes to me, at least in the form advocated by the purists. Sure, it brought a lot of useful stuff into mainstream programming, and that's good, but you don't need pure OO to get the benefit of using objects and defining your interfaces and being able to instantiate multiple instances and so forth. All of those things we can do in Access without full OO, and that's fine because those are the things we really need to build database applications, and we don't really need the more complicated aspects of OO (not that we could never need them, just that we wouldn't benefit from them often enough to justify the added complexity). [] >> Who cares? I don't work for companies who have 1000s of >> employees, nor even 100s. Why should I be excited about a >> technology that solves a problem that my clients will never, ever >> under any circumstances encounter? > > Why should you have been excited by com objects then? Because it was immediately obvious to me when Office 97 came out that here was a platform that would allow small businesses to build complex, rich custom applications on top of the Office platform for a fraction of what it would cost to build the same functionality from scratch. I was HUGELY excited about full COM in Office during that time frame because it exactly fit the needs of small businesses, who couldn't afford to buy huge apps that cost $100K but also couldn't afford to program from scratch all the functionality they needed. The Office platform enabled a whole new set of possibilities for those small businesses. > Did have to get > excited about it? No, but you sure as the heck been using this > technology from day one with access. I think your timeline is a bit foggy. Yes, COM was underneath Office in the c. 1992-94 time frame, and MS was implementing what they called OLE, because the main thing they were providing was ability to embed objects, a spreadsheet in Word, a graph in Excel or Access. But this was nothing close to the automation capabilities that would come once VBA was integrated into all the Office apps. That came with Office 95, quickly followed by Office 97 as the bug fix for it (and remember that Access 95 was not shipped with the rest of Office 95 -- it came out only a year later, Fall of '96). > At the end of the day, you have to ask WHAT is the fundamental > issue or problem that these new technologies are solving. The > answer to this question gives you the answer as to whether it's a > fad or not. But the question I'm asking is: Is it useful for *me*? (i.e., me and my clients) And I'm simply not convinced that "cloud" computing is going to be all that helpful to small businesses. [] >>> Again, all this stuff is not a buzz word, >> >> I'm sorry, but the dreck you just posted about Azure pretty much >> demonstrates that it really is a bunch of marketing-speak and not >> something real that solves actual problems that the clients of >> Access developers have. > > It's a significant issue for access developer's if you want to > build web sites using access, and want cheap affordable and widely > available services in the web in which to push those applications > onto. And if you don't, it's not a significant issue. D'oh. That's precisely my argument -- that you're asserting that it's important when that remains to be seen. It's not that I don't believe a lot of large companies will be moving to software services and data storage in the cloud. I simply question how ubiquitous it's going to be, and right now everybody's running around with their hair on fire claiming that everything will be in the cloud one day. You might call that the Strong Theory of Cloud Computing. I reject that in favor of the Weak Theory of Cloud Computing, i.e., that many large companies will move certain kinds of applications and data into the cloud, and some small businesses will find benefit from moving some of their apps to hosted solutions. Perhaps after I'm dead, it will all be in the cloud, but I don't expect to see it within my working lifetime (or even within my lifetime). [] >> I don't have a single client who wants to pay for their mainline >> software as a service. > > No, but you can't tell me none want to run a web site? Most of my clients already have websites, which, like email, is an "application" that should naturally be hosted, by virtue of what it is, i.e., a public-facing communications application. > None want to start > placing some parts of their business applications on the web? While none of my current clients want to do that, I have certainly had clients who might have wanted a limited web interface to their database application for their customers. But it seems to me that utilizing Access to build that is problematic. It means maintaining two separate Access front ends, one for publishing the website, and one for the in-office users. Could it be done to keep both parts in one front end and publish only the parts that were publishable? Sure, but I'd expect it to be more trouble than it's worth. At that point, the question becomes whether or not it's worth tying yourself to Access and Sharepoint for your customer-facing web interface. And it's not clear to me that it's a viable long-term choice because it's way to early. The possibility is there, but I don't know what the implications are for the long run, or what the daily realities of maintaining such an app might very well be. > It too > expensive to set these things up on a server by a customer by > customer basis... > > There's no question that some companies will want their own web > server, but the vast majority of my clients and customers simply > don't want bothered with setting up a web server to run that > software. ???? I don't know what issue you're addressing here. [] > The boat has left the harbor on this..the industry is investing > full speed into these technologies, and they will become > commonplace in the years to come. Go back and read about offshore outsourcing 5-10 years ago. It's embarassing and a lot of companies that offshored services have brought them back. Many still use offshore outsourced service providers, but the whole hog offshoring didn't work out -- only some subsets of services could be successfully outsourced offshore, and those that worked have stayed there, and those that didn't have come back. I expect exactly the same thing, i.e., claims today that everything will soon be in the cloud, followed by a mad dash to stick everything in the cloud, and then a retrenchment after people discover that in a lot of cases, it wasn't a very sound idea to begin with, while in others it will work just great. You seem to me to be at the overpromising/overclaiming stage in regard to cloud computing. You are in good company in that regard, since Microsoft and Google and the entire computer press are all doing the same thing. But it won't pan out the way they claim. It will be much less significant than they forecast, which is not to say it will be insignificant. It will just not be as game-changing as the marketers would like us to believe. -- David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/ usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/
From: Albert D. Kallal on 21 Nov 2009 06:45 "David W. Fenton" <XXXusenet(a)dfenton.com.invalid> wrote in message >> Actually, there is very large number of auto dealers, equipment >> sales and companies with 100's of employees that sell things on >> eBay. It not just all individuals . > > Uh, you respond to a point about GMail with an answer about eBay? > Not my intention to sidetrack that issue, however it doesn't really matter either way, it's a question of consuming some hosted service somewhere, gmail, or ebay don't really matter in this context.. >> There also popular CRM systems like sugarCrm that are cloud based. > > Cloud-based, or just hosted? > Ah..good! It is really fantastic of you to make the point/issue out of cloud based vs. hosted, I most certainly guilty of doing this, and yet here I am tooting a horn about how one REALLY wants to distinguish that cloud computing is significantly different than that of a hosted system. It certainly is. Its like so many calling access the database, and they're talking about jet, this distinction is important here. If you develop a software package for these cloud operating systems, that "install" package" is really very much like a msi install package for the windows desktop. This package can then be deployed to that particular cloud operating system. Once you give that package (application) to that cloud system, the OS takes over and does all the magic for you (such as requisitioning servers, gathering needed components such as the database servers etc.) > This is one of the things that indicates to me that "cloud" is a > buzzword, i.e., that it gets used for all sorts of things that have > always existed. > > I'm not saying there aren't applications where it is a good > solution. I'm only saying that you are overselling it. I have no > clients that would benefit from moving their mainline applications > to hosted solutions. Yes, I again much agree with you here. As I said some of these people who move all their business systems and processes to hosted (or cloud) systems are likely pushing things too far for my tastes. However, as I mentioned a lot of people don't always do the best thing, and there is that savings of $$ issue. Some people don't maintain their cars well, and I've seen some businesses with some pretty crappie delivery trucks. Others have beautiful drop dead gorgeous delivery trucks. Fact is some businesses don't always do the best thing. However for a lot of businesses, cheaper and less cost = simply better this happens all too often.. >> >> twitter and social networking is not a fundamental engineering >> problem that our computer industry is attempting to solve by >> adopting these new technologies. perhaps some of the social >> networking saw the result of adoption this new technology, but at >> the end of the day twitter is not an engineering solution for >> access or software developers. > > In the period 1990-95 or so, it was all about thin clients, which > was a solution to "a fundamental engineering problem" for the > computer industry. It never happened (or, at least, only in a > limited fashion, and not at all in the way it was originally > conceived of -- we run thin client applications on fat client > hardware, but the thin client hardware never really materialized). Actually there's quite a few vendors that created thin clients. However, if you want to know why thin client computing such as terminal services was never going to be mainstream or a huge success, all you had to do was ask me 7 years ago, and read the following article of mine: Why bother with .net when you have Thin Client? http://www.members.shaw.ca/AlbertKallal/Articles/ThinClientsand.net.html (you don't have to go and read it). To make a long story short, I explain in that article 7 years ago why.net's going to be a better choice than thin client. The reason was simple and that is that terminal services did not solve some of the fundamental problems that we developers needed to be solved when we develop software. so, again, as I said, if you ask the right questions, then you can tell if something being pushed is going to be a success or not... > > But that seems to be too small-scale for you. You're not happy with > that, you seem to need to push the bigger picture, and I think > you're overclaiming in that regard, and that could discredit your > closely focussed comments about A2010/Sharepoint. Actually, my point was I think for the smallest of businesses we now can move some line of business things (that should be moved by the way!) to the web. We are going to benefit as much if not more then the larger businesses that already has invested in these huge IT infrastructures to provide those web systems and line of business applications for their customers. With cloud computing, we will now be able to develop and offer web solutions to our customers at an affordable cost - both hosting wise, and both development cost wise. If we write to that particular cloud operating system, then things like database servers, even payment processing and email marketing systems will simply be components and services that we can include into our applications (just like we include things like word and outlook now into our desktop applications). So the way I see this cloud thing is that it helps the smaller developers and opens up more development opportunities for us. The big companies already spent the huge amounts of money to on their web systems and customer web portals. I really do think we smaller developers stand the most to gain here. >> >> You failing to distinguish between some fad like twitter and the >> underlying underpinnings of our software industry. > > You think Twitter is a fad? I don't. Now, maybe Twitter itself won't > survive, but what Twitter represents is being integrated into all > sorts of places across the web. It's becoming a service that is > being embedded in all sorts of social networking and blogging sites. > And that includes serious ones, like LinkedIn, not just "hobby" > sites. I should clear this up. Twitter may be a fad, may not be a fad, my WHOLE point here is that twitter is not some architecture or computer technology like XML, OO, or ole/com that is part of our development process when we write software. That what I meant by fad vs. underlying architecture for software, not to really state twitter is a fad or not. > > I don't feel we lack anything that real OO would help us with. It > would just make things more complicated. > We do have class objects, so we have some OO bits. I would like to see a web services consumption ability built right into access. (there was a soap add-in tool for access/office 2003, but I did not like how it worked). > > At that point, the question becomes whether or not it's worth tying > yourself to Access and Sharepoint for your customer-facing web > interface. And it's not clear to me that it's a viable long-term > choice because it's way to early. The possibility is there, but I > don't know what the implications are for the long run, or what the > daily realities of maintaining such an app might very well be. I actually agree with you on the above quite a bit. Having played with the system, I don't think the problem of having client forms and web forms the same application is really a problem. However, In the case of access web services, if the many widespread hosting options don't spring up (there are many SharePoint hosters for less then $20 a month), and in addition my assumption of the free officelive versions don't pan out, then this will not be cheap and affordable for small businesses at all. I'm betting right now this will not be a problem (I stress that this easy and low cost access web hosting is an assumption on my part). >> There's no question that some companies will want their own web >> server, but the vast majority of my clients and customers simply >> don't want bothered with setting up a web server to run that >> software. > > ???? > > I don't know what issue you're addressing here. > Simply that most businesses don't want go through the expense and time is setting up their own web servers. On the other hand, if they don't have a server, then what software standard am I going to write my web solutions to? So, this is where the cloud based operating systems come into play. We now just write to that particular cloud based os, and we have a packaged solution that we can sell to customers. So, our install + development model is very much like what we have for the desktop. Most web based applications take a LOT of setup work by the customer to make that software run on their web servers. These cloud system means our customers don't have to spend huge amounts of money and time to setup our software. Right now we write to a system called windows. We need the same for the web. Many of my customers have hosted web systems, but I can't just send them a web based application that will run on their systems. Cloud based systems opens up this opportunity for a smaller developers like me to package my applications. I am quite excited about what I see. I see Cloud computing opening up a lot of opportunity for smaller developers like me. -- Albert D. Kallal (Access MVP) Edmonton, Alberta Canada pleaseNOOSpamKallal(a)msn.com
From: David W. Fenton on 21 Nov 2009 17:31
"Albert D. Kallal" <PleaseNOOOsPAMmkallal(a)msn.com> wrote in news:NpQNm.26766$cd7.1630(a)newsfe04.iad: > "David W. Fenton" <XXXusenet(a)dfenton.com.invalid> wrote in message > > Some people don't maintain their cars well, and I've seen some > businesses with some pretty crappie delivery trucks. Others have > beautiful drop dead gorgeous delivery trucks. Fact is some > businesses don't always do the best thing. However for a lot of > businesses, cheaper and less cost = simply better this happens all > too often.. I am not convinced that it will be cheaper. What you might save in IT infrastructure you will spend in buying a higher level of connectivity (i.e., you'll need multihomed Internet access with more than one provider). And I'm also not convinced you'll get rid of any significant component of your IT costs, since you'll want you'll need someplace for the offline storage and for backups of your cloud data (you don't seriously think you'd use the cloud to backup cloud data?). I recall back in my early Access days I had a client who insisted they wanted to get rid of all the paperwork. I nodded my head and ignored it, because I knew perfectly well that there was no possible way to get rid of all the paper, nor was it desirable to do so. Paper is a really great technology and solves a whole lot of problems, even if it can be hard to manage. Our current IT infrastructure has many good things that come along with the annoyances and costs. But anyone who thinks that could computing is going to actually save money in the long run is foolish, in my opinion. It may make it possible for us to do a better job of maintenance, or to be better able to implement upgrades and such, but I doubt that it's going to be cheaper -- it will just move the costs somewhere else. This is, in my opinion, the same thing that computerization had done for us. It's not so much that we can do more work, but that we can do the work better and with lots of features included that were inconceivable or impossible before computerization. I would expect the benefit of the could to be similar -- no actual decrease in IT budgets, but in the long run, a nimbler, more responsive IT infrastructure (assuming that the people implementing it are not idiots, of course). >>> twitter and social networking is not a fundamental engineering >>> problem that our computer industry is attempting to solve by >>> adopting these new technologies. perhaps some of the social >>> networking saw the result of adoption this new technology, but >>> at the end of the day twitter is not an engineering solution for >>> access or software developers. >> >> In the period 1990-95 or so, it was all about thin clients, which >> was a solution to "a fundamental engineering problem" for the >> computer industry. It never happened (or, at least, only in a >> limited fashion, and not at all in the way it was originally >> conceived of -- we run thin client applications on fat client >> hardware, but the thin client hardware never really >> materialized). > > Actually there's quite a few vendors that created thin clients. Yes, but they didn't replace fat clients, which was the forecast that everybody was making back then (not just the people with a vested interest). And that's my point here -- cloud computing is going to be adopted in certain places but is not going to completely replace local computing. > However, if > you want to know why thin client computing such as terminal > services was never going to be mainstream or a huge success, all > you had to do was ask me 7 years ago, and read the following > article of mine: > > Why bother with .net when you have Thin Client? > http://www.members.shaw.ca/AlbertKallal/Articles/ThinClientsand.net > .html > > (you don't have to go and read it). > > To make a long story short, I explain in that article 7 years ago > why.net's going to be a better choice than thin client. The reason > was simple and that is that terminal services did not solve some > of the fundamental problems that we developers needed to be solved > when we develop software. so, again, as I said, if you ask the > right questions, then you can tell if something being pushed is > going to be a success or not... I never believed the think client hype, Albert, and my disbelief long predates your 7-year-old article. It was obvious that the hype was overblown, and that the thin client proponents underestimated the benefits of fat clients. I see exactly the same thing happening with the promoters of cloud computing. I never said thin clients wouldn't be useful in certain applications, just like I'm not disputing that cloud computing will be a big help for certain applications. It's the claim of ubiquity in both cases that I'm disputing. Somewhere in between ubiquitous cloud computing and no cloud computing is where we'll end up. My bet is that there will be a mix of computing platforms in the cloud and local and that duties will be transparently shared between them. The user won't care which CPU is handling the task, nor whether the data is being pulled from a hard drive in the local server closet or from a RAID array in a data center thousands of miles away. The question is what the balance will be. To me, far more important than the cloud is the issue of transparent load sharing. That is, the aspect of the cloud that is most important is that the system is virtualized at the highest level and you don't know or care where the actual computing is being done. That could be a benefit even with nothing hosted on the Internet -- it would be the ultimate load balancing system. And that's not here yet, so far as I'm aware. >> But that seems to be too small-scale for you. You're not happy >> with that, you seem to need to push the bigger picture, and I >> think you're overclaiming in that regard, and that could >> discredit your closely focussed comments about A2010/Sharepoint. > > Actually, my point was I think for the smallest of businesses we > now can move some line of business things (that should be moved by > the way!) to the web. We are going to benefit as much if not more > then the larger businesses that already has invested in these huge > IT infrastructures to provide those web systems and line of > business applications for their customers. > > With cloud computing, we will now be able to develop and offer web > solutions to our customers at an affordable cost - both hosting > wise, and both development cost wise. If we write to that > particular cloud operating system, then things like database > servers, even payment processing and email marketing systems will > simply be components and services that we can include into our > applications (just like we include things like word and outlook > now into our desktop applications). I see that as a problem. There's a reason for custom software development and that's because the available choices don't fit well enough the perceived needs of the client. If these hosted application components are upgraded, what happens to your customizations? What if the upgraded version has bugs? Right now I'm working on a client's website that has to be rewritten to run on PHP5. There is nothing obviously wrong with the code (i.e., it's not doing any of the things that were legal (and inadvisable) in PHP4 but illegal in PHP5), but it doesn't run. In regard to the features of PHP used in this website, almost none of them were touched in the rewrite of PHP5. But it doesn't run on PHP5, nonetheless. I'm not deep enough into it to know what the exact issues are, but the point is that you can't just independently update the platform on which your customized app runs without carefully checking that it works properly. I don't for a minute believe that there won't need to be customization for line-of-business applications, and those are the ones that are most crucial in terms of reliability. I just don't think it's going to happen the way you suggest. -- David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/ usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/ |