Where's the Emperor's clothes? (Office-03)

[wmfay1]

Mostly Access with some Excel and MAPI caled through COM. The big question is how does this affect authentication? What happened with the problem Q260819 "ACC2000: SendObject Method Fails in Access 2000" has been fixed, made worse? For those UNBAPTISED, DoCmd.SendObject fails silently if the body of your message is "too long" (~1500 characters). The failure is intermittent and SILENT. Then you run into a slew of security patch problems. (But I digress.) The real untold story is possibly MS wants us to abandon Access and go to .NET technology! (Would they be candid enough to just say that?)

[charlotte]

I have to disagree with your blanket condemnation. My feeling is that every version of Access starting with 97 has been an improvement. Some of the frustrations you have experienced are due to the complexity of the Office suite of applications and the fact that each app, language, and OS is developed by an entirely separate group of programmers, who don't necessarily talk to each other. In some cases, thanks to the courts, they aren't *allowed* to talk to each other. The metaphors that each application models are so vastly different, that I'm not sure the developers could communicate effectively anyhow.

[WendellB]

<hr>The real untold story is possibly MS wants us to abandon Access and go to .NET technology! (Would they be candid enough to just say that?) <hr>

I don't think that's the case at all - for the long-term, Microsoft makes more money selling Office than most other products. Can you envision doing a mail-merge using Word and doing it via .NET technology? It just doesn't work. And quite frankly, Access97 wasn't a terribly stable source to drive a web page from - we tried it and ended up switching to SQL Server stability. On the other hand we've been using an Access 2002 database behind a .NET website for more than a year with no problems whatsoever. I have to agree with Charlotte - Access has gotten better with every release, at least through 2002. The jury is still out on 2003, but it certainly isn't any worse than 2002, and there are some nice developer features in it. In the grand scheme of things, those who upgraded each time the product changed have the fewest problems, but spent more money with Microsoft. When you jump from 97 to 2003, you spend the money you saved (and maybe more) finding you way through things.

[NoBody]

MS does post the differences for EACH version. It is just NOT listed for those who jump from several version ago.

I have NOT seen ANY software company or any programmer that has done this. If you know of any one, please post a link to this list.

[DaveA]

For a more complete history on the updates of Office to the current version, just, do a search at http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en and in the "Advance page". Type in " new in Office" in the "related to the exact phrase" area and then select the Google search button. You will find over 3,000 entries which will cover Office 97, 2000 2002 (XP) and 2003.