Managing multiple versions of Access

[Atomic Shrimp]

I'm helping to manage a corporate upgrade of office across a few hundred PCs, which currently have an assortment of Office versions - 97, 2000, 2003 and maybe XP too - all to go to Office 2007.

There's no problem with licensing, as we have a corporate agreement - so if we want to, we can even install every version of Access on every PC.

The problem is - managing which files open in which version - some of them are databases which for an assortment of reasons have not been, maybe cannot be converted to later versions (well, not without a lot of re-working).

So... is there any reason why I shouldn't do this:

Rename the file extension on databases dependent on Access 97 to .mdb97, then associate file type .mdb97 with Access 97.

Rename the extension on databases dependent on Access 2000 to .mdb2k

and so on...
?

I just tested this on a small scale and Access seems to be happy enough to open a database with a non-standard file extension.

Or is there another, easier way? (bearing in mind that there may be a requirement to open multiple types on the same computer)

 

[Atomic Shrimp]

Heh. Turns out we already have a standard method for this - we create a desktop shortcut that launches the relevant Access exe, with the database name as a parameter.

 

[Alisa]

Sounds like you've solved your own problem, but if you also want to avoid the configuration message when switching between different versions of Access, you can get SageKey StartAccess which protects the registry (different versions of Access all share the same registry key).