Access™ 2007 VBA Programmer's Reference

Chapter 17. Working with SharePoint

The fastest growing business software product in the Microsoft family, Windows SharePoint Services is one of the hottest technologies for digital team site management available today. Flexible and easy to use, SharePoint provides users with simple site creation and design, robust content management, and powerful security for business data. Microsoft Office 2007 contains a myriad of new features that integrate with SharePoint to help users communicate information, and one of the pillars of the Access 2007 release is to provide seamless integration with SharePoint.

Access has added new features that fit into two basic categories: features that work from the server and features that work from within the Access client. Starting with the 2003 release, the Microsoft Office teams began a campaign to support content management on SharePoint for site design, online documents, and list data. In many cases, that could be done directly from within the Office application, such as from an Access database, a Word document, or an Excel workbook. Users of Office System 2003 may remember some of the features that Access offered to users, such as Edit in Datasheet or Access Linked Tables. While both of these features are powerful, they pale in comparison to the new features in Microsoft Office Access 2007.

This chapter describes how features of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 integrate with Access 2007. Interestingly, most of the features are so tightly ...