Hi Ken,

There are many ways to improve Access database design and performance. Our article related to Total Access Analyzer covers a lot of potential areas: www.fmsinc.com/Products/analyzer/ErrorsList.html

As for your particular situation, it's difficult to tell with such limited information. I presume you have a split front-end/back-end database design so that each user has a copy of the front-end application on their local machine. If not, check out this paper: www.fmsinc.com/.../Index.html

Do you have a permanent link from the front-end database to the back-end? Read this resource for more info: www.fmsinc.com/.../LinkedDatabase.html

Unlike a client-server environment, a file-server database like Microsoft Access processes all it's data on the front-end. That means, a lot of data may have to pass across the wire to your remote user's machine. That can be minimized if you use SQL Server on the back-end and design it properly. Bandwidth can also play an important role.

Of course, the point of this paper is to use VPN and RemoteApp to let people run the application over the Internet without any of the data streaming across the line. By keeping the data on the local network, the only info that crosses the Internet are the screen refreshes which should be relatively quick. Hope this helps.

Hi Gab,

Well, start by figuring out what kind of hardware you'd need to support for one user. Based on that, you can provide that many times it for the number of simultaneous users you want to support. That would be the high end cost. You may be able to support more with less cost per user based on what their workload would be while logged in. Hope this helps.

Luke

We've heard of some people using SharePoint to handle deployment of Access databases, but that's not ideal as you've found. We created a program, Total Access Startup, that lets you centrally manage and deploy Microsoft Access databases to your users and set which version of Access they launch. We're about to release our Access 2010 version which will also let you control whether they use (or not use) the 32 or 64 bit versions. It's great when you need to manage multiple Access databases and want one location to control and change it.

More information on the product along with a trial version is here: www.fmsinc.com/MicrosoftAccess/VersionLauncher.asp