One of the challenges most organizations face is how to coordinate communications and tasks among team members and external contacts. With multiple people and clients/projects, emails fly in many directions. People with vital information may be unreachable while customers may be providing information to someone in your organization while others who need that information are oblivious. When someone leaves a team or organization, much of their information is lost.

Over the years, we've helped several clients better manage their emails and treat them like a database. We've built solutions that work with Exchange and Outlook to automatically classify contacts, tag emails, and store the information in a Microsoft SQL Server database. The data is presented through a Microsoft Outlook add-in showing all communications with a contact's firm when you create or respond to an email. The data can also be displayed in the Facebook like interface to make it easy for everyone on your team to know what's going on.

There's no longer a need to look in someone else's Inbox since information is immediately shared between everyone who needs to know (even before the recipient opens their message). Searching for messages is quick and easy, and corporate document retention policies can be enforced.

To learn more about this and other innovative activities of our Professional Solutions Group, please contact our consulting team.

There is a persistent myth that Microsoft Access Jet databases can only support 20 or so users. Here's my response to a recent inquiry:

I question the data for the limitations on the number of Access users being around 30. We've run many tests and have never seen that kind of degradation in performance. It's a myth from Access 2.0 days that was eliminated with Access 97 over a decade ago. A well designed Access database can support hundreds of users. Of course, what matters is the number of simultaneous users, and what they're doing.

If everyone is just viewing data or entering data into a table, that takes very little work and a large number of people (well over 200) can be supported. People cannot type faster than what Access can handle. If they are all running massive reports and queries with data updates, that can still be done but performance would be an issue which applies to any technology, so testing and optimization would be necessary.

If the back-end database is in SQL Server rather than an Access/Jet database, the number of users can be practically unlimited if each user has their own front-end copy of the Access application. Performance issues still apply based on what they are doing. In some cases SQL Server is slower than Access, so it is important to understand the situation before thinking SQL Server is the answer.

All that said, any Access application that is distributed to others with shared data should be a split database design. Here are a few resources we've written:

• Splitting Microsoft Access Databases to Improve Performance and Simplify Maintainability
• Significantly Improve the Performance of Microsoft Access Databases with Linked Tables

We also offer a commercial product for enterprises, Total Access Startup, that helps with the distribution of databases to each user's desktop and launching the right version of Access.

We are very pleased to announce Total Access Statistics for Microsoft Access 2010 is now shipping, along with updates for earlier versions of Access. Total Access Statistics is the most popular data analysis program for Microsoft Access. It extends the data analysis capabilities of Access queries to let you perform advanced numerical analysis on your data. Use any Access table, linked table, or query to perform calculations such as percentiles, regressions, frequency distributions, t-Tests, correlations, non-parametrics, rankings, moving averages, etc. It can also perform data normalization and let you select random records. As you would expect in a query, you can specify Group By fields so analysis is performed on each set of records with identical group fields.

Total Access Statistics runs within Access with all output in Access tables. It supports MDB, ACCDB, and ADP databases.

In addition to supporting Access 2010, we've added Financial Calculations for Cash Flows. It now calculates net present value (NPV), present value (PV), future value (FV), internal rate of return (IRR), and modified internal rates of return (MIRR). There's support for both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Access 2010. It includes both the interactive wizard that runs as an add-in, plus the programmatic VBA library so you can embed statistical analysis in your applications.

Here is additional information for:

• New features for Microsoft Access 2010
• The new X.8 version for Microsoft Access 2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000

Free demo versions are also available for you to download. 

Microsoft Access, VBA, and VB6 include a wide range of built-in Date functions, including DateAdd, which calculates the difference between two dates. A common need, however, is to add a number of weekdays to a date, without counting weekend dates.

Learn about this and all our royalty-free module code in Total Visual SourceBook where you can also perform business day math with a list of holidays to avoid.

Total Access Statistics is the most advanced and popular data analysis program for Microsoft Access. Total Access Statistics makes it easy to calculate percentiles, regressions, confidence intervals, correlations, t-tests, probabilities, ANOVA, Chi-Square, etc. You can even normalize tables, rank records, and select random records, plus much more without any programming.

To maximize your use of Total Access Statistics for analyzing the data in your Microsoft Access databases, a professionally written and printed user manual is included. The user manual is 176 pages and fully indexed to make it easy to learn about Total Access Statistics, how to use it, definitions of its calculations, its programmatic interface, and tips for optimal use.

The Total Access Statistics user manual is now available for your review. Check it out to see how Total Access Statistics extends the power of Microsoft Access queries so you can analyze your data better than ever. To see it action with your own data, download the trial version.

The FMS Advanced Systems Group has a new video for its Sentinel Visualizer program: An Introduction to Social Network Analysis (SNA). If you are trying to find hidden relationships among people, places, and events, Social Network Analysis can help.

Social Network Analysis is a subset of network theory that finds important relationships and centrality in complex networks. Learn how organizations in the law enforcement, intelligence, defense, finance, and other data intensive fields are using Sentinel Visualizer in their missions.

Here's more information on Sentinel Visualizer and its Link Analysis features.

Here's another resource in our ongoing coverage of query techniques:

Learn how to create queries to find all the records in one table that don't have corresponding records in another table. If you're not familiar with the difference between INNER JOIN, OUTER JOIN, LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN, check out this new paper on these important query feature. It'll save you tons of time trying to code this yourself and will surely give you new ideas on how to better retrieve and analyze your data. The techniques apply to both Microsoft Access and SQL Server queries.

Here's an additional paper related to our ongoing coverage of queries. This time we're covering DELETE query syntax in Microsoft Access. In addition to the basics of deleting data and the SQL for DELETE queries, we also cover an interesting situation when DELETE queries fail during multi-table links on non-keyed fields.

If your query fails to delete any records with this message: "Could not delete from the specified tables", learn why and how to fix it with the DISTINCTROW syntax or setting the Unique Records property to Yes.

For more information on queries in general, read our paper on Microsoft Access Query Tips and Techniques.

 

Related to our detailed paper on Query Tips and Techniques, we added extra information on the basics and syntax of an Update Query in Microsoft Access.

We also have a related article on dealing with non-updatable queries: Error 3073: Operation must use an updatable query: Dealing with Non-Updateable Queries and the Use of Temporary Tables in Microsoft Access

We are all used to seeing the 'rows and columns' metaphor when looking at data. In fact it is the primary interface for many of our data analysis tasks.

But rows and columns can hide valuable patterns. What happens when you take data out of a database and visualize it as a network? Now you can see important connections, centrality, trends, movement over time, and many other key indicators.

Check out our article on Link Analysis and Social Network Analysis to see how our Sentinel Visualizer solution provides innovative ways to get more meaning from your data.