How to automatically update MS-Access 2007 application

Question

I have a front-end Access 2007 apllication which talks to MySql server.

I want to have a feature where the application on the user's computer can detect that there is a new version on the network (which is not difficult) and download the latest version to the local drive and launch it.

Does anybody has any knowledge or exprience how this can be done?

Thanks

Answer 1

Do you actually need to find out if there is a newer version?

We have a similar setup as well, and we just copy the frontend and all related files every time someone starts the application.

Our users don't start Access or the frontend itself. They actually start a batch file which looks something like this:

@echo off
xcopy x:\soft\frontend.mde c:\app\ /Y
c:\app\frontend.mde

When we started writing our app, we thought about auto-updating as well and decided that just copying everything everytime is enough.

We have enough bandwidth, so the copying doesn't create any performance problems (with about 200 users).

Plus, it makes some things easier for me as a developer when I can be sure that each time the application is started, the frontend is overwritten anyway.
I don't have to care about auto-compacting the frontend when it's closed (and users complaining that closing the app takes too long...), and I don't have to deal with corrupted frontends after crashes.

---

@Lumis - concerning the custom icon:
Ok, maybe I should have made this more clear. There is only one batch file, and it's in the same network folder as the frontend.
The users just have links on their desktops which all point to the same batch file in the network folder.
This means that:

1. future changes to the batch file are easy, because it's only one single file in one central place
2. we can change the icon, because what the user sees is a normal Windows link

(By the way, we did not change the icon. Our app is for internal use only, and I'm working in a manufacturing company, which means that all but very few users are absolutely non-technical and couldn't care less about the icon, as long as it's the same on all machines and they know how it looks like so they can find it quickly on their desktop...)