Automatic Operation

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Pepper

I have a rather interesting challange, made more difficult because my
company holds very sensitive information of millions of people.
What I want to do is Set Up a Recurring Schedule to automatically Run a
Report in Access 2003, convert it to a PDF and Email it to a defined set of
Users. Security issues will delay implementation of third party software by
many months until testing of new applications is complete - we have owned
Office 2007 for a year and still havent implemented it due to conflicts with
our security package.

Any recommendations on how to do this with MS Access
 
Who will need to "run" this?

If the person who will run this "feature" has years of experience using MS
Access, you can design the feature with much less "user-proofing" than
you'll need to include if the user knows nothing about Access and doesn't
care to learn ... they just want to send out the notice! Both points of
view are valid and possible, and "how" you do this depends on "what" the
requirements are...

Good luck!

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Office/Access MVP
 
You *have* to use some kind of 3rd party solution to generate PDF's from
Access 2003, there's just no way around it.

If products like Acrobat, CutePDF, Win2PDF or Bullzip are out of the
question, you *might* be able to use this:

http://www.lebans.com/reporttopdf.htm

If you can't even download and use that, then you are SOL. But then, it's
not your problem any more is it? Just tell the users concerned that they
can't have what they want, and direct them to the manager responsible for
your company's ludicrous security policy. You yourself might wish to remind
your bosses that the function of IT is to facilitate the business, not to
obstruct it.
 
Actually, the very intense security is a business requirement, not driven by
IT just implemented by IT. With their permission, we have much information
about our millions of customers that if in the wrong hands, could lead to a
lot of identity theft.
You need special security added to you Windows profile to burn CD's, or use
a unauthorized USB device, etc. Most of our user cant even get a mp3 player
to charge when plugged into their workstation.
Laptops have several levels of security to get through, in the event they
fall into the wrong hands. Can a skilled "badguy" get through all of this,
of course. But at least we make the best attempt we can to protect customer
privacy.
Lets not criticize policy without all the facts.

I have found some links on the Web that have lead me to a possible solution
to my problem.
Pepper
 
A policy which makes no provision for overrides, at an appropriate level of
skill or authority, to allow people simply to do their job is just plain
dumb whatever the security requirement.

Office 2003 is OK but 2007 isn't? Plain dumb. You can't install and use
Adobe Acrobat, the world's most used, trusted and relied-upon PDF creation
software? Plain dumb. Do your security people fear that Office 2007 or
Adobe Acrobat are going to start spontaneously emailing data to people? If
so, they are paranoid. More likely, they are just too darn lazy to figure
out what is a security risk and what isn't so they just ban everything.

All that hardware security makes perfect sense to me, but you state that, in
case of necessity, it can be overridden. Should be exactly the same for
software.
 
One consideration, given the intense security level you have is, of course,
the security of the data. In this instance, an Access database may not pass
muster. It is very easy to crack any security that can be applied to an mdb
and even easier to crack an accdb.

If security is that important, then perhaps storing the data in SQL Server
and using an Access front end to generate the report would be a reasonable
thing to do.

It is not difficult to create and email a pdf format provided you have Adobe
Acrobat or some other print utility that allows creating a pdf file. The
difficult part may be the email. There are security features in Outlook
that can either prevent or most like cause warning messages to pop up when
you try to send email from Access. Provided you have rights to install
software, here is a site to a utility that will work around that problem for
you:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/clickyes.html

Good luck.
 
BCAP, I am sorry you think we are dumb, but you may be one of our customers,
if you are in the US, and as such, you can rest easy that your Social
Security number, checking account numbers, Credit Card numbers, etc are in
good hands.

I dont know how I got into a discussion (argument) regarding security, when
my concern was to create a button on a Switchboard to "Run a Report", convert
it to PDF using Adobe Acrobat (yes we have it) or perhaps a snapshot, and
then e-mail it to a distribution list of about 100 people, using Outlook.
The data is downloaded from a mainframe weekly and imported into a DB, for
reporting. Yes we have a lot of SQL, and a whole bunch of other stuff, as
well.
As far as us being dumb, I attend twice a year, an unadvertised security
meeting attended by most of our business competetors. We compete fearcely in
the business environment, but we all have the same security requirements
because of the very sensitive data we possess. We share security concerns.
For those of you in the US, you may recall some security issues that have
occured with lost laptops and CD's that possessed SSN records of millions of
people. Our industry, with combined revenue of about 11 Trillion Dollars
does not want that kind of publicity.

So, with that having been said, I have found a couple of sites offering some
guidance but if anyone can enlighten me here, I will be grateful.

Thank you
Pepper
 
Pepper,

Have you read my previous post?
I hope I provided some useful information for you. If you need more detail
or have question, please post back.

As this is an open forum, even those with little experience and opions based
on that lack of experience may post here.
 
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