[AccessD] Access and Office 365 (SharePoint)

Hi all

Just attended for three days the Office 365 Summit here following the SharePoint developer track.

Besides that Office 365 including SharePoint moves so fast - and will continue to do so - that you will have a hard time to get up to speed, an interesting statement was, that Access has a top-priority for creating "Access style" apps running in SharePoint which is mostly anything involving more than one table/list or a spreadsheet.

Currently, as we know, these Access apps are quite limited because the only programming language is the new weird macros. Why it is so, we were told, is because the macros are converted to SQL stored procedures behind the scene, and this is because the "Access" tables actually are SQL tables in an SQL Server database created for the app. But the Access team is currently working on big changes (those were the words) to improve the features of Access/SharePoint combined. This is the only focus for the team, thus - if you were in doubt - you can forget about any improvement or new feature in Access not related to SharePoint.

Also, now I understand why it was so hard to understand programming in SharePoint. The reason is simple; the previous SharePoint SOLUTIONs from up to SP2010 (which are very difficult to program and deploy) are left behind in SP2013 and onward in favour of SharePoint APPs. SP solutions can still be programmed and will run, but you should only follow that route for special cases.
These apps are written in JavaScript and CSS, so if you have wondered if you should learn JavaScript or not, don't hesitate - just start, better tomorrow than the day after tomorrow. And while you are at it, get familiar with REST, OData and JSON because this is how all apps in Office 365 will communicate.

/gustav