Last Updated 24 June 2022

First the bad news:
Recently the Access development team made changes to the public Access Roadmap.
From now on, Microsoft will only list those new features that the Access engineering team has 90% confidence will be shipping in the month listed.

For further details and explanation of the reasons for this change of policy, see the blog article by Michael Aldridge dated 31 May 2022:
Changes to Our Public Roadmap and How We Communicate Access Feature Priorities

The result of that change is thatall future plans have been removed from the Access roadmap .
Needless to say, most Access developers were far from impressed as you will see from the responses to that article and in various Access forums.
For example, I replied:

Whilst it has been very frustrating watching roadmap dates slipping & being missed repeatedly, it is still far better than the new approach which gives a strong indication that development work is non-existent ... indeed it will encourage the endless rumours that Access is no longer being developed & will be killed off by MS.

I urge you to reconsider this decision & fall back in line with the previous roadmap approach still in use by other Office apps such as Word / Excel.

I also ask that you update both the Whats New section in Access Help and the What's new in Access for Microsoft 365 link available by clicking Office Updates....View Updates
The last entry in that article is almost 2 years out of date and states: There is nothing new in Version 2009 (Build 13231.20200), the September release.

Whilst the rate of development work is frustratingly slow (with little to show apart from Dataverse ... and the monthly bugs!), there have been changes/improvements & your team should be publicising these

Many other developers have made similar comments criticising the move whilst understanding the motives for doing so.
It remains to be seen whether there will be any reversal of the decision.



UPDATE: 27 June 2022
Now for the good news!
A new monthly blog series has been started giving details of issues fixed by the Access team in the past month or so.
For further details, see my blog article: New MS Blog - Access Issues Fixed



Colin Riddington           Mendip Data Systems                 27 June 2022

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