A Database for the Office?

travellerjohn asks: "I work in a small company (200 people in 7 offices), where the staff uses Microsoft Access to create various databases. Most of the time they lose interest before the databases become complex or important enough to warrant the IT department getting involved. However, from time to time, someone turns up at our door looking for help with their pet project, often starting with statements like 'it should work over the intranet' or questions like 'why can't it store documents and pictures?' or 'how do I control user access?' When we sit them down and explain how much it will cost to rewrite their database in PHP/VB/JSP, or whatever we sound unhelpful and expensive. What database tool does Slashdot recommend I provide our staff? It has got to be easy to use, web enabled, capable of storing documents and pictures and offer user level security. We have tried Sharepoint with some success but that is pretty limited, too, and I have looked at Oracle Application Express. Open source would be good, but I would pay for the right product. Any suggestions?"

servoy

[Anonymous Coward]

servoy comes to mind (not something I particularly liked however)...

What about a webserver?

[SeeMyNuts!]

"It has got to be easy to use, web enabled, capable of storing documents and pictures and offer user level security."

Is it hard to set up an office webserver with some sort of content management that everyone can use?

Take another look at Sharepoint

[ednopantz]

A relational db is one thing, a document collaboration tool is another. If it is a MS Office environment, get someone who knows Sharepoint to come out and show you and one of your power users what it can do. You can even buy/build modular web parts if your document needs are out of the ordinary.

You'll need MSSQL on the backend, so that solves your "bigger than Access" problem right there. These tools dominate their markets for a reason.

Claris FileMaker

[sakusha]

FileMaker seems to be the easiest for non-techies to grasp, and supports image storage, publishing to web servers, and other goodies they want. Also hooks to SQL if you need more horsepower on the backend.

Lotus Notes

[omibus]

Never thought I would say this, but if documents, images, and security for a web site are your main consern: Lotus Notes.

Easy to use with a little bit of training, and works wonders with documents (suppost to be better at it than sharepoint)

FileMaker

[doj8]

I've used FileMaker quite successfully for many years. It is simple enough for most folk, but extensible. It can store pictures and other binary data. The web interface can be customized. User level access control is built-in. It runs under Windows and Mac and in Wine under Linux. Databases can be migrated to a FileMaker Server, if they go beyond the standalone limits (10 simultaneous users, typically). There's also a compiler to create standalone applications from databases, without needing a license per user.

All in all, FileMaker is a great tool for this sort of thing.

Mod parent down!

[Anonymous Coward]

100% wrong on all counts!

Access CAN store anything as blobs.

As for supporting the rest, you're wrong there too.
-Access security model is a total JOKE - and a bad one at that. No normal RDBMS security, just some shitty broken built-in sorry excuse for security (and shitty cmd line tool to recover it).
-It *doesn't* scale. At all. This is thoroughly documented (you'd know if you had even read a FAQ or something). It wasn't EVER meant to be used for more than a handful of users (MS KB even state this). Put a few concurrent users and see for yourself. You'll be wishing for abysmal performance, as that'd be already a huge improvement (the underlying jet/dao-era tech sucks hard)
-access DBs are really inefficient - they use up FAR too much network bandwidth (making it slow for everyone else), are slow, and aren't even reliable over network links - expect your files to become corrupted every now and then.
-it doesn't use vbscript, but rather VBA. Another sucky poor excuse for an outdated sucky scriting language. Heck, even 10 years ago (well, with Office 97) it sucked. Bad enough that you'd even wish for PHP instead (and that's saying a lot). And VSTO is too complicated for simple things. Because you manage to script stuff in a spaghetti manner using world's poorest scripting language doesn't mean Access has the features in the first place.

Access is the single and ONLY worst DB than MySQL (It's bad enough that I could make a 600 page rant about it -it's by FAR MS' worst product - heck, I'd rather admit I use MS Bob and love the office paperclip thing and search assistant dog!). And that's coming from what most ppl here would call a "Microsoft Shill" and fanboy (C# coder, using .NET 2.0, SQL Server extensively, and looking forward to Vista - imagine that!) It has a easy mechanism to build "GUIs", but that's about it. The underlying DB itself is crap (and that's borderline insulting crap)

He'd be better off with a *REAL* RDBMS, be it MSSQL, Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL, Firebird, and even MySQL (don't like it much, but *anything* is a step up from Access, in terms of security, scalability, performance, availability, features, etc).

What he's looking for isn't so much a database itself anyways. It's something to create "GUIs" with it. Things like ASPMaker/PHPMaker/whatever from http://hkvstore.com/ [hkvstore.com] or such that'll easily and quickly create a simple web front end for the various DBs. If more time/budget permits, then yes by all means use code generation & ORM tools to create a quality, well made app instead (the generated ones aren't exactly the best, but it takes minutes to create the thing, and it's almost free)

Now, y'all go ahead and mod me -1, Flamebait because you know it's true.

TWiki or some other internal wiki?

[allenw]

Why not use something like TWiki? It can store those things plus it has decent enough access control. We've moved almost our entire business unit (around 600 users) web content and migrated a lot of processes to one centralized TWiki installation running on a Solaris box and couldn't be happier.

Re:TWiki or some other internal wiki?

[jd]

I've installed a Wiki at work for collaboration. Most ignore it (and bitch about the lack of collaboration tools), but a few use it. Ideally, you'd want to tie in a filter for MS Office documents, so that people could upload Word or Excel files and have them rendered (much the same way Yahoo's e-mail can - well, some of the time). There are a LOT of wiki systems out there (MediaWiki, IkeWiki, etc) which are good at different things. If this sounds like a good approach, then I'd suggest doing a little research to see which wiki system best lines up with what people would use it for.

Databases for storing just plain data are good, and both Postgres and MySQL have Windows binaries. In general, Access has a slightly better user interface (the others really only have engines and people are supposed to develop their own engines) but interfaces that are very usable do exist and may be quite adequate for basic office usage.

Access or SQL 2005 Lite

[Planesdragon]

For 200 users, with user-level security, you just need to find a tech willing to actually spend the time to make Access work. 2007 has plenty of additional gizmos, incluing a new "attachment" data type to, well, store those documetns you can't really store in Access.

(You can store Images in Access. You use the "image" file type.)

Now, if you just want to upgrade their database, the SINGLE CHEAPEST thing you can do is setup SQL Server 2005 Express. Access can upgrade itself to use the server (Use the "SQL Database Engine" if you're version-shy), and you gain all of those things that you don't have now.

Re:Claris FileMaker

[misleb]

I'd have to second this. Filemaker has come a little ways with FM 7/8. It now has centralize authentication (auth against ActiveDirectory). Has web publishing capabilities. And if you really need to, you can pull data from it into a "regualar" website via FX.php. I, personally, wouldn't use Filemaker because I'd rather use a "real" development environment like Ruby on Rails for database driven applications. But filemaker seems to work well for people who can put together MS Access type stuff.

As for SQL support in Filemaker though, I must say that it is pretty poor. As far as I know, Filemaker can only IMPORT from SQL sources. It can't access them live.

-matthew

ZOPE is all you need ...

[be_kul]

and - for instance - Plone, too: It
- runs on almost everything (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, *BSD - from Servers to Laptops),
- is very easy to set up and maintain, - has an easy-to-understand web-based user interface,
- has a simple but powerful user management
- can store data in almost any SQL database, but
- comes with its own, very powerful object-oriented DB (ZODB).
Especially the last point makes it appear "naturally" to many users: They can store data as they are used to do in their filesystem inside folders, documents etc. There is a LOT of additional, easy-to-use plug-ins (called "products") that allow, for instance, to put files onto the filesystem through-the-web -- and: all is very easily scriptable with Python.
So: Welcome to the Zope/Plone Community ;-)

Access - SQL migration

[iamr00t]

Migrating from Access to SQL would be logical for you. Clients keep using Access and its forms to access the data, so they keep the application that they developed, and you get managebility, proper multi-user and access permissions.
It will be almost transparent for users.

Re:Mod parent down!

[johnashby]

I have designed databases in Access that support over 250 users concurrently, and there are no issues of latency or corruption. These databases are not simple "advance to the next record" databases either: they are comprehensive, feature rich applications that tie in seamlessly with the Office applications my users expect to be able to use. I even coded my own security system that is "good enough" in our intranet environment to keep any nosy users out.

What can Access do easily and well? How about slapping together a presentation in Powerpoint and e-mailing it directly to users? Dumping database content directly into PivotTables for executive analysis...and providing a form to allow them to build their own custom data views. Using Excel objects to chart directly in the database...and provide the ability to get that data out for more detailed analysis. All with no servers, no full-time team of empire-builders who insist everything has to be done in an overly complex way to justify their own jobs.

The snobby dismissal of Access is generally the result of seeing bad implementations of it. There are places where Access is a horrible choice, and there are "developers" who will mangle anything they touch, including Access. But I will tell you this: nothing can touch Access for speed of deployment for its scope. Paying through the nose for a PHP/Java/MySQL/whatever solution that the users have NO chance of being able to tweak by themselves is only a good deal for the developers, who can hold the users hostage when they need changes. I would say that for most small-to-mid-sized organizations(up to around 250 users per database), Access databases can fulfill many of their ::internal:: needs. The Internet? That's a different question entirely...run away screaming from Access for that.