Hi,

I have developed an Access application to administer competitons for a
photography club. Now, because of the workload entering all the data, I
am looking to make it multi-user. That, in itself, is not a problem, and
I have done such apps in the past.
However, thie issue here is that the whole thing isn't in a single
office, running over a LAN, or at separate offices with a leased line
etc. The need is for various people to access a central database from
their houses.
So, where should I keep the database? And what are the performance
issues? Options that occur to me are...
1) Have a server at some convenient location (i.e. in someone's house)
and set up VPN links over the Internet from the other houses.
2) Put the database on an ISPs system, using the Web space you get with
an account. I don't suppose you can have a VPN link to an ISP, but I've
heard of installable File Systems that make ISP disk space work as an
accessible file system. This was for Linux admittedly, but I'm thinking
something similar might be available for Windows.

Do either of these make any sense? Can you see any problems etc? Would
doing this over the 'net be feasible anyway? Any other options to suggest?

The actual application doesn't do any heavyweight processing, data entry
only really*, and I'd put the user interface objects on each machine,
and only have the tables on the central 'server' so I'm thinking
performance might be adequate.

(* phase II of the competition admin, where images are judged, reports
printed, etc. could be done on a temporary LAN on the judging day.)

Regards,  John