Save money by building mono-focused solutions instead of mutli-year cloud based contracts
August 01, 2017
Save money by building mono-focused solutions instead of mutli-year cloud based contracts
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Access
We were a small team that had limited budget for shared services technology. [it was used for] Things that needed to be managed from a shared services perspective such as an applicant tracking system, basic HRIS system (time off aggregator, performance review, and hours entry), and technology asset ownership, etc.
These were across whole organization needs that were mainly used and administered by the finance department (the defacto shared services manager) but it was used from a user perspective by all employees.
Use of MS Access was a way to solve internal data aggregation needs that a spreadsheet couldn't do because of the need for stakeholders to have access to enter data and then to restrict that data from users.
These were across whole organization needs that were mainly used and administered by the finance department (the defacto shared services manager) but it was used from a user perspective by all employees.
Use of MS Access was a way to solve internal data aggregation needs that a spreadsheet couldn't do because of the need for stakeholders to have access to enter data and then to restrict that data from users.
- It is user intuitive for a db system. with a GUI that is often very comfortable to most users. This is simpler than other more robust db programs and the WYSIWYG editor makes things easy to get users to by into data entry designs and forms designs and then change them as users' needs changes.
- It has a lower hurdle to cross over to get things going. If you have people with higher level technical aptitude you can start to build much more robust systems
- You can control data flow to users and that is important.
- There are more robust and "sexy" db systems that tech savvy people will probably give higher rating because there is more robust sql or nosql languages to make references and calls.
- While more user friendly, there is still a steep climb for the average user. Luckily most people who are going to implement something like this across org will have a stable of tech savvy individuals to help make the Access db's more robust.
- The ROI for us was more in not having to spend money here and there on these mono-focused app/web based solutions that would have also met the need but our only incremental cost was our labor of our tech savvy people.
- Be prepared when you create the application/db/access points, now you have to manage them and users will think that your their to tweak it to their desires. Sometimes when we purchase software elsewhere we can default those complaints to "that is their ____, and there is little we can do". You own the system, for better or worse!
- We saved money and were able to keep growing and gave interesting projects to our tech guys to build, play with, learn and stretch.
I am sure there are other database systems, but for us we built mono focused systems to other products would have been web/cloud based HRIS systems.