InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

The software lets developers call procedures from Microsoft's SQL Server 7.0 database from within Access 2000, its desktop database, using graphical wizards instead of handwriting code. That's important as Microsoft's customers increasingly build Web applications on intranets and extranets, enlisting millions of Visual Basic developers who aren't always familiar with writing to the enterprise SQL product, says Microsoft product manager Benzi Ronen.

"Access is a way of quickly building database solutions for short-term projects like accounting and customer management. The problem came when companies tried rolling out those departmental solutions to the rest of the company," Ronen says. Access 2000, which Microsoft shipped earlier this year, tackled that issue with scalability--now, SQL Server could be the data store for Access applications. Grizzly, Ronen says, "is the next step."

Access Workflow Designer addresses the problem of quickly writing replication schedules and security measures into applications that run on the Web, says Brian Randell, a senior consultant at MCW Technologies, a Microsoft consultant and integrator in Endicott, Wash. Business managers who tap sales and other company data through business portals also need to view this data from the road, making offline access important.

Yet effective applications must separate summary data available to most users from more-specific information available only to executives or employees in a given region, for example. Historically, that has required writing voluminous code to download relevant business rules to a user's PC that can be enforced when offline.

"This is a good 1.0 product," Randell says. "They're doing some nice stuff that isn't necessarily difficult, but that a person wouldn't want to have to write."

Bit by bit, Microsoft is fleshing out its knowledge-management strategy with developer tools for linking Office productivity apps, its Exchange messaging platform, and back-end business data. Says Randell, "They did it in typical Microsoft fashion--let's take something complicated and try to simplify it."