There’s a really great new service available to teach and learn Office 2010 available at www.office2010tutor.com.  Instead of watching tutorials and recreating the steps, you can just download their software and have it do the task for you. Their player has over 850 helpful tutorials for Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint.  There’s a free trial too so give it a try.

Help4Access is an Access Consulting company that focuses on migrating your database applications to the Cloud. Contact Sasha and his team today to get your applications into the cloud today and start seeing increased speed, reliability and availabilty of your company’s most valuable data.

Access Hosting has a close working relationship with Help4Access and they are familiar with all of our hosting plans and solutions. We highly recommend that you check them out if you need any sort of development or application level support.

How can I load my Access database into the remote desktop session?

There are 3 ways to accomplish this. 1) Use a Copy/Paste from your local machine into the remote session 2) Look under the “Computer” icon in the remote session. You should see your local drive displayed 3) Use a web based storage service like www.dropbox.com to transfer the files.

Can I have multiple concurrent users accessing the same database?

Sure – if you purchase more than one instance of the remote desktop we can provide a networks storage location that can be mapped as a Z:\ (or any other letter) drive and used for the backend of your Access Database.

How do I connect my Macintosh to the Access Application in the Remote Desktop?

The Microsoft Remote Desktop client for Macintosh OSX can be downloaded at no charge from http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads

How do I connect my iPhone and iPad to the Access Application in the Remote Desktop?

We recommend purchasing www.jumpdesktop.com from the App Store to connect your iOS devices to the remote desktop

How can I backup my Access database?

We recommend using a www.dropbox.com account and installing that into your desktop. You can then setup regular backups that move your information into the cloud.

Can I use a local printer?

Yes. Any printers that are locally attached via on LPT port are fully supported. Printers that are connected via your local network or USB are also supported but need to be mapped into a local LPT port before they are visible to the remote desktop session. The command to do this looks something like net use lpt3 \\servername\printer /persistent:yes. Do this before connecting to the remote session and the printer should be visible.

Can multiple users share a single remote desktop instance?

Yes, but only one user can be connected at a time. If your users connect at different times during the day they can share a single remote desktop instance.

This week, we are happy to announce a special promotion for anyone looking to try out Access Hosting.  This promotion is specifically geared towards Office 365 users looking for web based reporting functionality, iPad, iPhone, and Android support, email enabled databases, and permissive file handling of PDFs. Anyone can Test out Access Hosting for 3 months and get 1GB of space and 5 users for only $99. If you are tired of the limitations of Access Services in Office 365, this promotion is perfect for you!

For more information on this promotion, please visit our Office 365 Promotion Page.

1st RDP session: $99/month

Next 2-5 Users: $89/each

6-10 Users: $79/each

10+ Users: $69/each

We hope that this will alleviate some of the expense to our clients.  Unfortunately, Remote Desktop will always be a pricey option for concurrent users because of the resources needed and the expense of Windows/Microsoft licensing.

1. Open iPad’s Safari Browser
2. Type in your SharePoint site URL into the Safari Browser
3. Fill out the prompt with your Access Hosting Credentials
4. Click login
5. After you SharePoint site loads, click All Site Content in the left quick launch menu
6. The iPad sometimes has issues with scrolling in SharePoint 2010, so you may need to click the View button ans select “Sites & Workspaces”
7. Click on your desired Access Hosting Database
8. Your start-up web form will load in the browser
9. Viola! you can use your Database right on your iPad!

As mentioned in our previous post, the key is to have Firefox downloaded and installed on your Android Device.

A lot of people have been asking us about getting their Access Hosting Application and SharePoint 2010 site working on their Android Phone or Android Tablet.  Let me start off by saying that we have not tested every Android device out there (there are a lot), but we have been successful getting our own simple hosted web contacts database working on a variety of Android phones.

The key problem that people run into when using Android is that the default browser is not supported by Microsoft SharePoint and blocks the authentication prompt.  The fix is very simple.  Download the free Mozilla FireFox browser from the Android Marketplace. 

Mozilla FireFox is a fully supported browser by Microsoft for SharePoint 2010 and while every SharePoint feature may not work on the phone, you certainly can view all your Access web forms, reports, and queries.