Open Access Support
We provide friendly help and support for users of SPI products including Open Access III (OA3) and Open Access IV (OA4). We have great affection for this old DOS program, which was so far ahead of the game when it was released in 1984. Unfortunately the product never got the wide distribution that it deserved and as we all know, Software Products International (SPI) finally disappeared in the mid 1990’s.

Malcolm Smith (the MS of DBMS) together with George Allard were the founders of the UK Open Access User Group and continues to be evangelic about Open Access

DBMS Computer Systems are now one of the few organisations in the UK who currently support and develop Open Access (OA) applications and we have major clients who still use OA for strategic database applications. If you have a legacy OA database application that has problems or needs documenting then we can help.

If you still use Open Access, have any problems or just want to make contact with another OA user then mail me

OA on-line resources
There are very few Web resources for Open Access but as we find them we will list them below

Open Access User Group (Australia)
Michael Paine's Hints and Tips
Dispi.com - Patches & printer drivers
OA Bulletin Board (Germany)
Open Access Forum (Germany)

Please let me know if there are any more that should be included.

MS Access
We have been developing applications with Access since it was launched by Microsoft. Over the last decade this has given us a great deal of experience in solving Access problems and we are more than happy to share this with you.

We have also had many instances of having to rectify Access applications developed by people who have moved on without leaving documentation. If you have a departmental Access database that sometimes fails and no one knows how it works then get in touch.

Export and Import of Data
Over the years we have had many requirements to transfer data into and out of both Open Access and MS Access and this has become one of our specialities. The transfer data can be in a variety of formats, from ASCII text, various database formats through to direct transfers to or from Word Processing and Spreadsheet programs. If you need to transfer data then we can probably help.

Want to move from OA to MS Access?
We have converted large numbers of Open Access applications into Microsoft Access. In some cases we re-created the Function Key control to mirror the OA keyboard functions. The existing users then had a windows database, which they could use via the keyboard with minimal re-training. New users could use it as a mouse driven windows database. In all cases we were also responsible for the data conversion and can probably help if you have problems with this.

Vintage OA Information
If you want to search on a database that contains hints and tips that were originally articles in the User Group Newsletter, then click on the SPI image. This data was stored in an old OA database from our archive files and although most of the articles are out of date some of it makes interesting reading. The query that you build is shown and you can revise it to try different word searches.

If there is enough interest we could add new records and develop this section into a resource and point of contact for Open Access users in the UK.