PARTY!
Exactly 1 year ago, after some preparatory work, I published the first articles here. The aim was to improve the information about Access, particularly in terms of bugs, new features and inputs on versions, availability or events. Microsoft has traditionally neglected this "organizational" aspect of communication even more than the purely technical one.
The most urgent was information about update bugs, because nothing is worse for Access users, and especially developers, than when their applications suddenly and "without reason" have major problems, leaving them alone without any information.
It was clear to me from the start that I didn't want to do this work alone, but together with a few other experienced colleagues. Over the past year, we have expanded the AFo team to this group of six people:
Not everyone writes a lot here, but we discuss a lot before articles are published and all contribute their knowledge and opinion. This teamwork improves the variety of topics and quality enormously.
As current or former Access MVPs, we have direct contacts to Microsoft and can provide information in both directions. We inform Microsoft about newly emerging bugs and their details, which are reported in forums etc. and try to speed up the fixing of bugs with repro scenarios and contact referrals. We succeeded in doing this several times in the first year. Thanks to all members of the Access community who have helped us in this venture!
The Access team at Microsoft supports us in both areas, bugs and features, as you can see from bug information, workarounds, dates for upcoming fixes or release dates for new features, which we are often the first to report. We are happy for others to use the information we provide. After all, our aim is to disseminate useful information about Access.
So far we have published 44 blog posts in these 5 categories:
Bugs 16
Findings 11
Features 7
Events 7
Tools 3
As you can see, there are categories with fewer articles. The tools category in particular remains an open task, as its primary reason is to support a tools/package manager initiative for Access, which is making only slow progress, mainly due to a lack of time. We'll see if this improves in the new year.
All in all, I think what we have achieved in the first year is ok. Please use the comments section to let us know what you think about the site, including any suggestions for improvements.