jane flowere
janeflower2999 at yahoo.com
Sat Apr 26 23:59:09 CDT 2003
Hello, I am new to this list. A friend of mine mentioned that I should come here looking for advice on an issue I am looking at. He said if I am looking for answers to questions with Access there is no better place on the web. Hopefully someone here can point me in the right direction given my situation. I have been working with access for a few years now and really like it as a development tool. I have a database system, a simple security layer, an interface, and a reporting tool all bundled into one package. After I got comfortable working with VBA and some of the idiosyncrasies of the development tool I really feel in love with it. There is one thing though that I am really stuck on though and it is deployment. I have to send the run-time with it. This of course makes since but it is so big (using access 2000). I seem to remember a smaller runtime with earlier versions of access? Even the access 2000 mini install is 40megs. Is this the case with access 2002? Here in the office I am okay with this, as I know what is and is not on a computer. But I am very concerned about selling an application via the web or off the shelf using this development tool because I have to send the run-time. Does anyone here on the list have any experience selling software off the shelf that uses the access run-time? If so can you give me some pointers? My friend pointed me in the direction of the sage-key/wise install builder software, which creates a slick install, and after burning the setup.exe it created to a CD (with the run-time in the bundle) I figured I was good to go. But then I got to thinking about some different situations and realized I needed to re think a few things. What happens when I send this out and it installs run-time access 2000 on a computer that has access 97 or access 2002? What happens if they don’t have an access install when they load this, but then later install access 97 or 2002? All the material I have seen on the web says it is quite a mess, is that true? If they do this I think they will see a prompt every time they move in and out of the two versions of access when the registry is updated. Is there anyway to avoid this? Does anyone know of an off the shelf software package that might be sold at a major retailer, even a smaller one, that uses the access run-time? I’m just wondering if anyone does this. Also something else crossed my mind about data backups. I have my application split into a front and backend setup with all the data in the backend file. I would like to provide my users a way to backup their data but I know they won’t all have zip drives or cd burners. Is there anyway to span an mdb across several floppies using vba? Thank you for any comments or guidance you can provide me. Jane __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com