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?"

Comments

It's not as bad as you think

[Southpaw018]

Access cannot store pictures or documents. However, you could use its hyperlink field type to link to other office documents, though that's stopgap at best. The Office hyperlinking system is kinda ugly.

Other than that, Access supports everything you just mentioned out of the box. User access, publishing, replication...you can even whip up a small Wscript/VBscript to pull down user names and security rights from Active Directory via LDAP.

Really, it's not as bad as you think - the only major problem is storing images.