In September, 2001: There was a lively discussion and question and answer exchange on a number of topics. Again, it seems that product activation was the "hot" topic of the day, and our new Microsoft contact was good to provide additional information on the subject. (Just for information, Larry upgraded the memory in his notebook, with Office XP already installed and Office XP continues to open and run.)

In August, 2001: Toi Beveridge Wright, President of our sister organization, the Metroplex Access Developers, spoke at a combined meeting of Application Developer Issues and the Access SIGs. Toi gave an introduction to n-tier applications, using Access, Visual Basic, and Active Server Pages. This approach is used on web based database applications, from somewhat small to very large. The user interface is 'thin-client' using the web browser with Active Server Pages executing on the server, business rules and data access components that are created with Visual Basic, and an Access database (although it could well be a server database if you need the capacity).

In July, 2001: SIG Leader Larry Linson began to take a 'first look' at Access 2002. We started with some general information, but the topic of interest was clearly the new Activation policy (and various provisions of the License). We never got past the group discussion to take a look at any Access 2002 demos. Larry noted that the highly-touted Pivot Tables feature was, for unexplained reasons, disabled. He thought it was due to accidentally installing Office 2002 in the same folder as Access 2000. However, after discussions with Microsoft Tech Support, an uninstall and reinstalls, the feature still is disabled. Another call to Microsoft Tech Support is on the priority list.