Deploying Data Access Pages on the Web

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After you create a data access page in Access, and open it on your own computer in Internet Explorer, you might want to place it on your Web page so that other users can look at it, or perhaps modify the data it displays. This is not as easy as you might think, at least for the individual Access user. You may have prepared a data access page, and created a Web site hosted on an ISP, but that's not all you need to publish Access data to the Web. Many ISP-hosted Web sites don't support publishing data from users' databases, and those that do (usually only for more expensive commercial accounts) may have their own restrictions on the type of data that can be placed on the Web site or the software that may be used to place data on the Web page.

If you have a Web site hosted by an ISP, check with your ISP for information on whether (or how) you can publish data from Access databases to your Web site. For example, the ISP may support only Active Server Pages (ASPs) with ActiveX Data Objects(ADO) or Remote Data Objects (RDO), not data access pages, which is not much help if you want to publish a data access page.

On the other hand, if you are a corporate Access user, and your company has its own Web server, possibly with Web folders for publishing data, you can deploy data access pages to the Web using Internet Information Services (IIS) or other high-end tools, which are beyond the scope of this book. The MSDN Online Downloads Web site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/) has information oriented towards large corporations that have their own Web servers and the resources needed to implement two-tier or three-tier databases on the Web, with security, firewalls, and other advanced features.

For more information on publishing data access pages to a Web server, type Publish Web pages in the Ask A Question box in Access 2002 and select the Publish Web Pages Help topic.