First Published 13 Oct 2022

The latest changes to the Access 365 'roadmap' were published in a new blog article by Michael Aldridge today:
      Our Road Ahead - Microsoft Access Engineering Priorities Oct 2022





Summary

1.   The emphasis remains on fixing existing bugs rather than announcing new features.
      The longstanding Inconsistent Database Error (AKA Monster bug) is still high on the priority list.

      However, after more than 4 years, it is hard to believe that a fix is imminent.
      In the meantime, the official advice remains to use a work-round to disable leasing on the affected workstations.
      See Access reports that databases are in an 'inconsistent state'

2.   Although disappointingly short of significant new items, the list does include a new feature to support macro signing with a digital signature.
      This is a long overdue feature which should fix the code slowdown issue described in my article on Trusted Locations

      The macro signing feature is currently available to those on the Insiders (Beta) channel and is likely to be rolled out to the current channel soon.
      Hopefully, this will be in the November update of Access 365

3.   The new web browser control based on Chromium Edge WebView2 has been promised for several years but is at last being actively devloped.
      When released, it will act as a replacement for the antiquated web browser control based on Internet Explorer

4.   The remaining items are 3 improvements to the new Dataverse connector which was released in June 2022 to a less than rapturous response from Access developers.
      It is probably fair to say that uptake so far has been rather limited



What has changed?

In April 2022, the Access roadmap looked like this:



Many of the items listed had been promised for a long time but delivery dates had slipped repeatedly. This had caused a lot of frustration

In May 2022, the Access product manager announced that a different approach would be used.
As a result, Microsoft now only lists those new features that the Access engineering team has 90% confidence will be shipping in the month listed.
For more info, see my article Changes to the Access Roadmap

At that time, all items were removed from the roadmap except for the Dataverse connector which had already been released
All remaining items had become 'public priorities' (listed in order of importance)



Five months on and three items are no longer listed as public priorities:
1.   Enabling Large Address Aware (LAA) for 32-bit Access
2.   SQL Monaco Editor
3.   New Microsoft Graph Data Connector

What is the status of these missing items? Are they now 'private priorities? Or have they been dropped?
Who knows? Even as an MVP, unfortunately, I have no idea at this stage

Overall, it seems that whilst progress is being made, future development of Access continues to be a 'long and winding road'





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Colin Riddington           Mendip Data Systems                 Last Updated 13 Oct 2022

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