I am always looking for was to start using Teams for more than a messenger program. Now after Ignite, I am determined more than ever to start now. One of our engineers found this Access Program that someone developed for inspections on our welding equipment. Only two people need to use it and I wanted to make it available in Teams via OneDrive or SharePoint for them both to use. They both have Access on their local PC's. I tried copying the accde file to the FILES section of the Engineering TEAM and then clicked on it but it just wants to DOWNLOAD and open locally. I'm assuming this is by design but I was wondering if anyone has successfully launched and written data to an Access DB in Teams/OneDrive.

I know this is not what you want to hear but Access DB will never work very well over WAN or internet. It was barely usable on a LAN with high speed ethernet on mapped drives. Access DB is very susceptible to corruption and row locking problems when in multi-user scenario. You may get it to work by mapping drives using WEBDAV to the Teams location or by copying to a single users OneDrive and creating shares but trust me it will never be stable and offer the performance you desire. You may be better served to spend the time using the New Lists App in a Team tab or migrating the DB to a SQL server instance in a small Azure subscription and maybe use the Access DB for Forms and Query front end from each workstation and link to the Azure SQL.

Shared Access Database Launched From Teams

Forrest_H
Steel Contributor
Oct 01, 2020
I know this is not what you want to hear but Access DB will never work very well over WAN or internet. It was barely usable on a LAN with high speed ethernet on mapped drives. Access DB is very susceptible to corruption and row locking problems when in multi-user scenario. You may get it to work by mapping drives using WEBDAV to the Teams location or by copying to a single users OneDrive and creating shares but trust me it will never be stable and offer the performance you desire. You may be better served to spend the time using the New Lists App in a Team tab or migrating the DB to a SQL server instance in a small Azure subscription and maybe use the Access DB for Forms and Query front end from each workstation and link to the Azure SQL.
- PassRusher
  Copper Contributor
  Oct 01, 2020
  Forrest_H
  
  Nope, this was a good reply and perhaps a bad "first project." That said, I have a project where I can utalized SharePoint Lists and PowerApps. That said, being in a SOLO IT shop, got to find the time.
LouisSwanepoel
Copper Contributor
Jan 08, 2021
PassRusher I use access successfully with teams. You need to replicate all the tables in your database as SharePoint Lists (With the same name as the tables. then you remove the original tables and connect to the SharePoint lists in stead. You still need to have the access file on your local pc but the data now resides in the Teams SharePoint site. The only limitation is that you cannot access the db in teams itself or on a mobile device. If you want to access the app on mobile, you will have to redevelop it using PowerApps. Hope it helps!
- RJ2021
  Copper Contributor
  Aug 25, 2021
  LouisSwanepoel
  Hi, I have the similar issue for accessing the MS access file from Teams. Every time my team tries to access it, that starts to download on PC. I see you were able to resolve it.
  Could you please elaborate the steps with some more details on replicating all the tables in your database as SharePoint Lists ??? . I'm not an expert in MS access 😞
  
  Thanks,
  RJ
  - C_F_Gillis
    Copper Contributor
    Aug 29, 2021
    I have same issue. Have split Microsoft Access DB. Want to share with a couple people. I have setup teams but am not sure how to proceed to change the tables to SharePoint lists.

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Shared Access Database Launched From Teams