Office 365 Error- Access Services reports are not enabled.

I have long been sceptical about running custom SharePoint sites on Office 365, but I thought as its maturing I'd give it another bash.

I needed to store a list of contacts and other meta data, so I thought I'd add a "Contact Web" subsite.  This is actually an access database that is hosted in Sharepoint.  Very clever I thought, but so near and yet so far.....

The default Address book view allows you to add and edit contacts, however in the Note portion you get a correlation error saying "Access Services reports are not enabled. To view the report, open the report in the Access client." - not very helpful.  If you try to go to the Report Center tab you get the same issue.

Apparently the reason is that Office 365 hasnt turned on access services !    So the Contact Web subsite that that Office 365 allows you to create isnt fully supported by Office 365 !!

Come on Microsoft, either offer full access services or handle your errors properly and dont offer a site template you cant support.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2632471

Error- Access Services reports are not enabled. To view the report, open the report in the Access client. - Office Professional Plus developer - Office 365 - Microsoft Office 365 Community

Access Web Services : form filtering and sorting

If you setup a form based on a table source and then add in the forms properties to sort and filter, when you add this form to a Navigation page it completely disregards what you have entered in the forms properties and  just uses the default sort for the table with all values - Brilliant Microsoft!

Filter and Order By Properties  get ignored.

So to get around this for sorting you need to write a query on your table that has the data sorted in the format you require.  Then change the form to use the query instead of the table and that’s sorting sorted out.

But what about filtering?

Well on the tab for a navigation page there is a property called "Navigation Where Clause"  if you put your where statement in there Microsoft actually uses this filter in the way you would expect and doesn’t ignore it as before.  Wonderful!

Navigation Where Clause's do  work

Access 2010 Web database conversion

Native SharePoint 2010 is dissapointing in terms of not being able to have relational data lists or lookups with filtering and for reporting I used Access reporting based on SharePoint lists.
With Access Services in SP2010 I thought I'd just convert these reports and data sources over, but as ever its not that simple. You need to create a new Access Web database and then import tables into Web Compliant tables. It would appear that linked tables to sharepoint are not compatible. As ever with Microsoft so near and year so far from a complete solution....

Here is a very good article about converting your access databse "Converting Access Databases to Access Web Databases (25th May 2010)"