Steer clear of Access Web Applications (AWA)

Microsoft Access Web Applications (AWAs) are Dead!

AWAs are going the way of the Dodos Microsoft has just announced!

In their recent post Updating the Access Services in SharePoint Roadmap, from the Office Retirement Blog, Microsoft states formally:

We no longer recommend Access Services for new apps. This feature will be retired from Office 365. We will stop creation of new Access-based apps in SharePoint Online starting June 2017 and shut down any remaining apps by April 2018

So the writing is on the wall, steer clear of developing any new AWAs and look into migrating your existing data prior to the deadline so as to not loose it.

This won’t come as a terrible surprise to many as Microsoft hadn’t invested in any new features in quite some time and had by appearance abandoned it over a year ago.  That said, just when we finally thought we were moving forward with a web solution, Microsoft, once again, pulls the rug from right under our feet!  Sad, but not surprising as this was their 3rd failed attempt at porting Access to a WAN environment:

  • Data Access Pages
  • Access web databases
  • Access web apps

Does anyone else feel the BETA Burn?!

It is just sad to see Microsoft’s lack of engagement with their own products that they continue to walk away from products, time after time, rather than completing them properly.  They finally were heading down the right path, but once again never finished the product, never added the features that people were requesting!  They keep ignoring the feedback provided by MVPs and end-users alike!

Now Microsoft wants us to turn towards PowerApps.  All I can say is think long and hard before jumping into this new product because if history is any indicator … I’ll be posting about it’s demise in 2-3 years!  Moreover, from what we have seen of PowerApps, the supposed replacement for AWAs, are far from being capable of doing what we, Access users, need.  For one thing, they do not have any Data Macros so implementing business logic is simply not possible at present!  So as it stands right now, Microsoft provides AWA users with no viable alternative solution to turn to, you need to use alternate technologies altogether.

What irks me however is the fact that they promoted https://access.uservoice.com/forums/321915-access-web-apps when they knew that they weren’t going to move forward with the product/service.  Why give people false hope and tell them you’re listening when that simply is not the truth!  184 Web App suggestions made and not 1 was ever implemented!  People were talking, but Microsoft sure wasn’t listening by all appearances.  Is uservoice as a whole just another Microsoft feel good PR stunt to make user believe they are being heard I wonder?

Let me also be perfectly clear, this announcement in NO way impacts the future of standard MS Access Desktop databases, they continue as they always have!!!

Update 2017-04-12

Microsoft has closed the comment section on there original announcement page after 2 weeks.  Great way to support your users, just don’t allow them to say anything!

Useful Links

Please note, that there are already reports of problems with the data migration tool, so you may wish to wait a few days to hopefully allow Microsoft to fix whatever the issue(s) is(are).

Alternatives

So with Microsoft terminating AWAs what is one to do exactly!  Well, I personally have always believed that if you are going to develop something for the web then you need to use proper web technologies, things like:

  • PHP
  • .NET
  • MySQL

That all said, fellow MVP Julian Kirkness recently found himself scrambling to find a suitable replacement for his AWAs, and since PowerApps are not capable as mentioned above, he did some digging and has recently found a tool called Zoho Creator.  You can review his experience and thoughts on his blog at Zoho Creator Review and see if it might suit your needs too.

27 responses on “Steer clear of Access Web Applications (AWA)”

  1. Carlos Quintos

    Great article. The original post from MS has plenty of comments that say it as it is

    1. Daniel Pineault Post author

      I concur.

      I especially liked

      Good luck with doing that in PowerApps. It’s advertised as a “no code solution”, but it’s hardly as simple to develop as Access. Unless you’re using the CDS, it’s an absolute pain to to make a simple form in PowerApps that actually writes to a SharePoint list. The product simply isnt ready yet. — Brendon Brooks

      I think it says it all.

  2. Frank Dupuis

    PowerApps are toys and no ready for prime time yet. What a joke. Anyone that decides to follow MS’ lead down the PowerApps road is a fool. Walk away, no make that RUN AWAY fast, and turn towards any other company that doesn’t flip and flop continuously like Microsoft does. They obviously have no long term plan and care little about their developers.

    I’m seriously looking at FileMaker, but the pricing is a little nuts, but the product is much better than AWAs.
    Another option is switching out completely of databases, and truly moving over into the realm of Web Application development using proper web technologies. A learning curve for sure, but I think the ROI would justify the investment.

    One way or another for me, MS is dead for anything Web based. You can’t treat people like that, continuously, and get away with it. At a certain point you have to stand up and say enough and this announcement was that day for me.

  3. Isaiah A

    It is really sad. I have developed a couple of Web application using AWA, only to discover that it has been retired. It is time to move over to .NET/MVC. A higher learning curve is required though but I think the investment will pay off in the end.

  4. Stefan Luedtke

    What a shame MS. There are many reasons why AWA haven’t been a fast starter. It was a major hassle for me in my company to get SP2013 working with AWA – and it would have been much bigger to eventually move to SP2016 … Then MS stopped developing embedded features that would have moved AWA from great and simple to perfect and simple. Nontheless, in our company (100M+ employees) there is significant demand for user driven data integration and it started to get going with AWA. Wow – I had not expected the sudden death of something that has helped us to move forward on digital integration.
    As MS cannot offer anything to replace (for our needs) we started to explore Quickbase, which nicely developed to be a simmilar simple yet even more powerful tool including much better visualization and customization options. And it even avoids any hassle with SP or O365 as it is running on the Quickbase cloud. When we move to QB with my applications that were built on AWA there is nothing left MS can disappoint me about (unless they discontinue Excel).

  5. alia

    powerapps sucks. That’s all I know. Powerapps for mobile? sucks times sucks. Thank you Microsoft, for throwing all our efforts into bin in a glance.

  6. Karen

    This is most frustrating and disappointing!!! After almost 4 years of trying to get the buy-in for SharePoint from management, I finally got SharePoint online and now have two AWAs online in production that are working perfectly. Now I have to re-write 150 very customized forms? Not to mention all the macros and queries that make the apps work!!!!

    1. JP Cox

      Karen – you hit the nail on the head. I ended up selling Sharepoint to my company with our AWA app for project management, and now we have that nice little reminder at the top of our web app that the product is retiring. The only way I saved some face is telling my company i’ll make sure everything we do now in AWA will be moved into PowerApps. Except, as I get into it that doesn’t seem to be possible. In 2016 MS is pushing AWA – now in 2017 they are retiring it. How can MS be so dumb not to realize how upset we’d be with that type whiplash?

  7. E Wills

    Can anyone tell me what the PowerApps learning curve is like? Do I have time to learn PowerApps before Microsoft discontinues it? Because spending time learning technologies that will soon be taken from me helps to feed my masochistic tendencies. Cheers.

    1. Daniel Pineault Post author

      Of course you have time to learn it before it becomes deprecated. They want you to fully invest, migrate other solutions over to their technologies before they terminate them leaving you stranded! 🙂

      1. E Wills

        You are correct, Daniel.

        I cannot begin to express my disappointment in Microsoft’s decision to deep-six Access Web Apps. I considered learning another db solution but stuck with Access because I can be a little lazy. The inner slacker in me rejoiced when AWAs hit the scene. I was so happy I had, for years, bypassed the MySQL/PHP books at my local Barnes and Noble. 🤔

        It is time to rip the Band-Aid off and shitcan Access altogether. Barnes and Noble here I come.

  8. Andrew Couch

    As another Access MVP, could not agree more. MS Seems to have lost the plot!

  9. Mark

    I developed a number of AWA’s for my business and came very close to committing to them with all of our data. I am very glad that I did not. And yes, this is a shame.

    It’s clear now that the only path forward for us is away from Access after all these years.

    I think Access—all of it— is dead. MS is not the desktop software company I grew up with and the future is with the nice fluffy cloud where our overseers can keep an eye on our data. Or something like that anyway.

    1. Daniel Pineault Post author

      At one time I would have defended Microsoft, but those days are long gone. I’m not so sure that your idea of steering clear of MS products, Access in particular, isn’t unfounded at this point in time. Sadly, MS simply does not seem to have a clear plan or commitment to the product. What they do put forth truly has not advanced the product in close to 2 decades now. Using Access 2003 I can create the same database using 2016. No reason to have moved to Access 2007, 2010, 2013, or 2016! While all their competitors are improving things, MS flip and flops around like a fish on a deck gasping at anything they can.

      I wish they listened.
      I wish they had focus.
      I wish they had a plan.
      I wish …

  10. christian

    Make Access Web Apps an Service just like PowerBI and PowerApps. I would be more that happy to pay a monthly fee for AWA than rebooting everything in PowerApps

    1. Daniel Pineault Post author

      I lot of people are seriously questioning the motivation and urgency in shutting everything down just as AWAs seemed to be gaining some traction.

  11. Pritesh

    It is completely outrageous for them to decide to take it off air completely! Months of development just went down the pan. I understand if they just stop supporting their products/versions after a few years like Oracle do, but to take them offline completely is unacceptable.

  12. itperson

    A total disaster for a client of mine who stores over a thousand records on for their multinational company! How short sighted on Microsoft’s behalf, this is going to cause my client and myself a massive amount of time and effort.

    I certainly will not recommend any sort of database storage using Microsoft cloud ever again, because you cannot trust that they will not just pull the plug again.. a very VERY terrible decision, shame on Microsoft.

    1. Daniel Pineault Post author

      This is the type of story I hate hearing about. People who invest into the technology and then Microsoft, is this instance, just abandoning them.

      I think many people are in the same boat and feel the exact same way about the entire situation and Microsoft.

      As the saying goes:

      Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

      I think a lot of people don’t plan on being fooled a second time. I know I don’t!

  13. Paul Francis

    Why does the service have to be shutdown so quickly. Could MS not leave it running for two or three more years. I have clients who do not have huge budgets and this is going to hurt them a lot. The cost to MS is nothing.

  14. D K

    I’ve been in software development for 40 years and the hype about codeless apps hasn’t changed. (Remember CASE in the 80s?) I just finished my third PowerApps application because it is actually very good for prototyping my designs to hand off to my developers. Took me a day to create a complete set of screens for CRUD workflows on my data model in SQL server.
    That said, PowerApps is extremely frustrating because of the amount of bugs and inherent design flaws. It will never be more than a toy. After managing offshore projects for years in a certain Asian Country, it reminds me of the quality from the software out of there. Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s where PowerApps is developed.

  15. John

    I’m very disappointed in Microsoft’s abandonment of its developers and customers on this one. I have several clients using AWA for business critical data processing. This is going to cost me a lot in loss of profits as we develop other technologies and possible lose business and miss new business in the process.

    I’ll just have to bite the bullet, invest in learning ‘proper’ web technologies and then abandon Microsoft products in favour of companies who deliver. It’s a shame as I’ve loved using Access.
    but now I need to prepare to abandon the Microsoft ship.

  16. Apps4Rent_Amol

    Access is deprecated in SharePoint Online. There are not many options in this case as MS want us to use PowerApps and abandoning AWS which took effort to make cant be dropped easily. There is no clean workaround either…I will lay down what we are doing here.

    Background: Access Services and Access Apps will work with SharePoint Server 2016 till Product Life Cycle.

    Option 1:

    Customers who are using Access Services or Access Web Apps with Office 365/SharePoint Online
    can be moved to SharePoint Server 2016 environment. You could look for some provider who can provide Access Web Apps in hosted SharePoint environment. There are quite a few of them. For example, we have been providing Hosted SharePoint since SharePoint 2007 days to the latest SharePoint Server 2016. We are also a direct Tier 1 CSP (we get to see both sides and hence have some benefit). Many of our customers who use Office 365/SharePoint Online along with Access Web Apps are facing similar dilemma. We recommended some of them to move to our Hosted SharePoint 2016 environment. We have been able to move them successfully in almost all cases along with the database and Access Apps. We are doing the same with Office 365 customers who contact us-We recommend them to get a Hosted SharePoint 2016 Enterprise with a hosting company.

    Option 2:
    Setup an on-prem dedicated server and move the apps. This take you away from the cloud part and you will need to manage your own SharePoint environment which is costly to manage. You will need to take the app and get it working in your on-prem environment.

  17. Pamela Pennington

    I am a Software Development manager for a small non-profit and we still have two Access databases that we are supporting. One of them is very large, and the rewrite will take over a year when we are ready to get serious. In the meantime, it has a SQL Server 2008 back-end. I tried migrating at least the database to Azure SQL and that actually worked, but the performance for the end-user is too slow, so I’m back to the drawing board. I had looked into Power Apps, but in order for me to do that I would need to purchase their non-free tier to use the data gateway, and the front end development tool they have is not the same as Access, would require significant investment, basically a rewrite which I don’t want to do in Power Apps for the very reason you all mention – I don’t trust that Microsoft will not pull the plug on those in 2-3 years.

    The bottom line here is TRUST. Microsoft is not earning my trust. I have other .NET apps my team is developing for Azure and we are trying to become an ‘All AZURE’ shop, but I am so nervous, and getting help for this endeavor has been ridiculously hard. I’m worried that everything I’m doing right now is going to be changed unceremoniously without any hope of a way out once we are in all the way. The current buzz words are ‘LOGIC APPS’, ‘POWER APPS’ ‘Serverless computing’, ‘Functions’ all putting us at Microsoft’s mercy, all making it very possible for Microsoft to lay flat a very shaky house of cards.

    1. Daniel Pineault Post author

      Trust is the right word. The way things have gone as of late, I think a great many have lost their trust in Microsoft.

      Being burned by Web Databases and the Web Apps, I can’t see any serious developers diving head first into PowerApps. I know I’m not.

      This is why I recommend (and have for quite so time now) using tried and true Web technologies. Open-Source is a good option.