Access was introduced by Microsoft in the early 1990s and has been available as a stand-alone application or as part of the Microsoft Office Suite ever since. It has gone through various different versions (see left) and is now the leading desktop database product in the market place.

Many firms are already licensed to use Microsoft Access as a result of purchasing the full Office suite or via a bulk licensing agreement with Microsoft. In many cases Microsoft Access is installed on users machines along with Word, Excel and Outlook etc., yet few take full advantage of the potential it offers.

Microsoft Access is a very powerful and sophisticated database solution rarely used to full potential.

It is capable of supporting small to medium sized groups of users with demanding data processing and application requirements. Integration with the other MS Office products and with other core business applications offers the ability to transform business processes.

Many Internet sites and even more Intranet sites are based around an Access database.

Access offers an effective yet quick and economical answer to many database requirements.

It is often said that Access is not a "real" database and is not suitable for multi-user or network use. This is simply not true.

There are limitations in terms of the size of the database, the amount of data that can be stored and the number of users who can simultaneously use the system.

In practice only the number of simultaneous users is normally a problem. Subject to a satisfactory network being in place it will cope easily with small groups of users (e.g. up to 10). However, with a sound database design and an optimised application in place, larger groups can be supported. If the database is being accessed via a web browser then enterprise wide access can normally be supported.

We have seen instances of 25-30 users running concurrently although this is not recommended and in these cases we started migrations to Microsoft SQL Server as a matter of course. SQL Server is Microsoft's enterprise class database which can cope with hundreds of concurrent users.