I support the 1, 3, 2 prioritization. With regard to the first item (1) below, Microsoft Office 2013 Access is now provided with the Office 365 Home Premium subscription and all Office 365 Business subscriptions that include the current (now 2013) Microsoft Office desktop applications.
With regard to the prioritization, an alternative to (2) is to spin Base out as a distinct companion application to the Apache OpenOffice distro (thereby becoming another approach to (2)). It could still be supportive of ODF Text and Spreadsheet formats and ODF-supporting applications for report viewing, etc. Being more loosely-coupled might be preferable for the kind of refactoring and technical-debt forgiveness that is apparently called for. It would also satisfy preferences for greater-modularity. It would also simplify separate development of mobile-scale and cloud-based apps. - Dennis PS: I suspect that the Access 2007-2013 .accdb format may be important to support if one wants to provide any sort of interop parity. .mdb might be important as well. TL;DR: The page of screen shots that Rob linked in a post about Splashscreens includes all of the desktop apps that are part of both Office 365 Home Premium and Office 365 Business subscription versions. The screen with the initial templates for creating new Access databases includes both external and desktop cases for each template style. (The matching desktop versions are scrolled off the bottom in the screenshot.) With Office 365 Small Business Premium, there are two available (cloud) Sharepoint locations available by default (one personal, one team) for creating external databases. Desktop databases can be on shared file systems. I just tried that out with the Desktop Issue Tracker creation wizard. I was able to create one in my SkyDrive-synchronized desktop directory also. For the record, also included, beside an allowance for installation on up to 5 devices, are automatically synchronized settings amond the devices and Office on Demand (a way to install over the internet on another computer temporarily). Also included in all of those are Outlook, OneNote, and Publisher. The Home Premium includes Skype and SkyDrive bonuses, whereas the Business subscriptions provide Lync, a cloud Exchange service, and SkyDrive Pro (a cloud Sharepoint Service). Visio and Project are still extra. Business plans have a subscription supplement that provides server space for sharing team projects. I don't know about any Visio subscription supplement. These simplified, expanded arrangements are apparently a consequence of the wonderful marginal-cost benefits of an internet-based subscription and provisioning system for commodity software and services. There are a variety of student plans with differing features. Some require confirmed student standing. -----Original Message----- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2013 06:53 To: dev@openoffice.apache.org Subject: Re: questions about Base---do we need an embedded DB? [ ... ] Some other interesting facts, most of which we're already familiar with: 1) Microsoft doesn't include Access in their base Office packages. So on the one hand this means that most Office users don't use a database, or they do lightweight database work in their spreadsheet. On the other hand, the fact that OpenOffice has a database included is a distinguishing feature of OpenOffice. [ ... ] So the future is likely going to look like one of the following: 1) We encourage a critical mass of volunteers interested in maintaining, improving, testing, documenting, supporting, etc., Base. As we know achieving critical mass is made more difficult by the senseless forking of the project, which hurts LibreOffice Base users as well. 2) We continue as-is, with a gradual degradation in stability, until an incompatible OS change, or a security flaw comes along and administers the coup de grâce. 3) We drop Base before it gets to the point where it harms the reputation of the project. My ordered preference would be 1, 3, 2. -Rob > > > -- > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > MzK > > "Achieving happiness requires the right combination of Zen and Zin." --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
