Chapter 10. Reporting and web applications using Access
This chapter covers
In this chapter you’re going to complete a scenario where you’ll capture equipment/hardware requests by clients. I chose this scenario because it’s a common process that you’ll find in IT teams. Even more often I’ve seen hosting providers capture such requests to keep track of their servers. But this process can be used in any other scenario where you need to create a reservation-type system to prevent communal resources from being double booked and to keep individual users from checking out more items than they should. Another example where this could be used, apart from the IT-related scenario we have here, is for reserving a book from a communal library. Keep using your imagination; the techniques you’ll learn here can be used for many other scenarios.
In this chapter we’re going to walk through two options for capturing the information and reporting on it. The first approach, implemented with SharePoint Foundation, will work as long as your users have SharePoint Foundation and Access. The second approach will require SharePoint Server, and because you’re going to use Access Services, the advantage is that it doesn’t require your end users to have Access. Let’s start by talking about the scenario you’ve been given and how you’ll attain the solution utilizing SharePoint.