In 2014 I wrote the LinkedIn article: If you're looking at OFFICE 365, and you use Microsoft Access, look harder. At the time, Office 365 fell short of my expectations, mostly because of its treatment of MS Access. Initial publicity about MS Office 365 promised the ability to move MS Access databases to their cloud server. But, as my clients moved to Office 365, we discovered Microsoft promises of cloud capabilities for MS Access were inadequate. Complex Access databases could not be used from the cloud platform without major revision.

​Over the years folks have asked me about using MS Access in a remote environment. In time, using a remote desktop setup surfaced as the best remote environment solution for MS Access.

One of the biggest misconceptions business folks have about Microsoft Access is that it is going away. Many people are under the impression that Microsoft no longer supports Access, or that Microsoft plans to jettison Access altogether. This is simply not true.

One of the largest misconceptions about Microsoft Access is that it’s expensive. Many people operate under the assumption that if they build a data management solution in Access, that every user will need a full version of Access installed on their machines. This is a wrong assumption.

​Microsoft provides a runtime version of Microsoft Access. It does not cost anything to download and install Access runtime, on user machines. If your organization builds a multi-user Access application, you would only need to pay for the full version of Access for administrator/developer machines.

​One of the biggest misconceptions about MS Access, is that it isn’t a secure database. To be fair, the misconception has some grounding in fact. If the MS Access database is using native tables, then it isn’t any more secure than an Excel Spreadsheet. But, this is a simplistic understanding of the issue. Following are some things to take into consideration, about data security and the use of Microsoft Access.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Microsoft Access is that it can’t handle complexity. In regards to a multi-user environment, many professionals continue to operate under the paradigm that MS Access doesn't work properly in a multi-user environment. This assumption is an unfortunate and costly mistake.

​i’ve worked with MS Access since version 2.0 back in the Mid 1990s. I’ve watched Access go through all the various upgrades and transformations. I also have extensive experience with SQL. From experience I can tell you that Microsoft Access serves many of my clients very well in a multi-user environment. MS Access is a tool. And like any other tool, it has to be used properly. So, there are best practice protocols to using MS Access, but there are best practice protocols to developing in any other database software as well.