Tell me about your Inventory application

Sorry I haven't posted for a few weeks. I recently took an enjoyable NCL cruise with ports in Costa Maya, Santo Tomas De Castilla, Belize, and Cozumel. It was rewarding to spend a week playing hard with my lovely two little girls and Taunya. Love that!!

Back to work...

As I have mentioned in previous posts, Access templates are wildly popular and provide a foundation for many new Access applications. Improving the templates and expanding the number of templates offered will continue to be important as we move forward. The Inventory Management happens to be one of the most popular templates we ship, yet the scenarios and potential data models vary wildly. Some inventory applications track specific items while others track quantities. Some scenarios require re-ordering with and with-out purchase orders. As you know, the scenarios get quite complicated.

The Access 2007 version of Inventory is a good starting point but we think there are plenty of ways it can be improved. Some people on my team are going to be spending some time thinking about different user models, scenarios, and possible data model alternatives. I’m a huge fan of listening to customers and hearing more about the inventory applications in the real world.

For those of you with existing Inventory Management applications it would be helpful to learn more about your scenario, navigation model, data entry forms, data models, etc. I would be most grateful if you could take a few minutes to tell me more about your application. The outline might go something like…

Describe your business scenario.
How many tables, forms, queries, and reports are in the application?
How long have you been using the application?
How many records are in the biggest tables?
How many people use the application?
How many people concurrently use the application?
What is the backend database?
Describe the business rules that govern the application.
Describe and provide screen shots of the applications opening screen.
How do people navigate the application?
Describe and provide screen shots on how people enter data into the application.
Provide a simple screenshot of the relationship window with the most important tables.
What reports are most commonly used?

Rest assured, the time and effort you spend describing your application will be super helpful for the next iterations of templates and influence Access 14 development.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2007
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  April 20, 2007
  Feel free to respond directly to me with images. My email is clintc AT microsoft dot com. Thanks!