So today Microsoft announced their “Office 365” Suite of “Cloud” offerings. Previously known as BPOS (a name which I REALLY hated) it will soon include the option to “subscribe” to Office Professional as part of the deal.
Note that I said “Professional” – that means Access !!!
So if anyone decides to involve themselves in Office 365 for the Exchange, SharePoint, LiveMeeting and Communicator/Link products, they will likely want Office as well. It won’t take long for companies to realize that they should provide the Desktop Office offering for their users, at least for now, because they will probably find that the Office Web products are going to continue to be under-capable and there would be no off-line story there either. So if they go for Office 365 with Client-side Office 2010 they WILL get Access.
Also, and perhaps most importantly for Access devs, is the fact that Access Services is included with the SharePoint subscription available with Office 365. No problems building a justification for Access Services with your SharePoint Managers – it’s included !!
Very cool and improves the prospects for development of departmental Access apps with the new features of Access 2010 IMHO !
Dick
Dick Moffat's Spreadsheet and BI Blog 
Just visited the 365 beta site and no mention of Access. Only Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Onenote. These are the same apps available on MSN.
Yes – that sucks but no big surprise. the most important facst though are the subscription with Office pro and the availability of Access Services. They just haven’t included them in the “spin” – yet 🙂 … We’ll see about that but the stuff I’m saying is real and very cool IMHO.
Dick
Access Services is not considered an Office Web App, so it is not listed among Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Onenote. But it definitely is included Office 365. Check out page 3 of the Office365FactSheet.docx that you can download.
Yep – Now someone has to tell Microsoft about that 🙂 …
Dick
I continue to enjoy your series on Access services and the hybrid application. I share your interest in using Sharepoint to serve up the app and the data for geographically distributed dispersed users. It seems like it will be much easier to use than terminal services and Access replication (no deprecated).
I would appreciate it if you would publish sources of wisdom in utilizing this technology. Beyond the basics, please.
thanks
Bob