[AccessD] Controlling an Access Reporting Application from an iPhone, iPad or iPod

All,

I have started to do a fun little R&D project and I would like to share my ideas (and solicit your feedback).

Background – 

I work for a small manufacturing firm (50 employees) with a very limited IT budget.  I have used Access 2007 to build a series of “Report Jobs” that are automatically run every night.  The generated reports are e-mailed to key employees every night as PDF files.  These employees can view the reports on their home PCs, but most of them like to view the reports on their iPads or iPhones.  This works nicely.

Recently, there was some discussion about actually “running” the Access reports on an iPad.  I explained that this was not possible, but it might be possible to “Control” Access report jobs on the Windows Server from an iPad or iPhone.

Here is the approach that I have started to experiment with.  


The iPad Side -

I recently purchased an iPad product called TechBasic.  It sells for $15.00 on iTunes.  It is for application development and testing.  However, to deploy an app to other devices requires a second $50 product called TechBasic App Builder.

TechBasic is a flavor of Basic that is geared to the scientific community.  It has many easy-to-use GUI objects.  With a small amount of work, I have built a test application that runs on the iPad.  This application uses a GUI object to collect a small amount of what I call “Report Control Info”.  (Example – Run Sales Order Report-100 for Midwest Division).  This small amount of control info is uploaded to a server via FTP commands in the TechBasic app.


The Windows Side -

One the Windows Side, I have built a small “Listener” program that is set up to run every 5 minutes.  (This time interval could be less if needed).  The Listener program simply obtains the “Report Control Info” via an FTP “Get”.  The Listener program uses the info that it obtains to initiate the generation of the appropriate Access report with any uploaded “report parameters”.  Once the report is generated, it is automatically e-mailed to the requester as a PDF file.

Admittedly, this is a somewhat crude and simplistic approach, but I believe that it will be a useful tool for our users.  In addition, there is very little investment in this approach.  The reports are not returned “immediately”, but I don’t believe that this is going to be a problem as they will be returned in a few mintues.

Previously, I experimented with several “Remote Desktop” type products that run on the iPad.  I had some success but I believe that this approach would be too complicated for our end users.   

I am curious if anyone else has looked into this realm of bridging the gap between the world of iPads/iPhones and the Windows realm.  

Again, this is sort of a fun little R&D “Hobby” project and I am open to suggestions, alternative ideas, etc. 

Thanks,
Brad