[ms office - 2003] Access - TEAM.mdb

[sonofsanta]

Evening all,

 

I've just started at a new school so I'm trying to pick up old problems that I know nothing about, which is proving... well, exhausting.

 

It seems the school used to run an Access database called TEAM released by Education Software Ltd. in Warwick. It's fairly amateurish stuff of the sort often peddled to schools and thankfully we don't use it anymore (although we have Serco instead now...) but a teacher wants access to it for historical data.

 

When I open the file (Team_2612.mdb) it complains about macros and security, but clicking through all that, as soon as I try and do anything in the database it crops up with "ODBC--connection to 'TEAM' failed". Oddly enough an older version of this file with outdated data has no such issues, so the Office installation would seem to be fine, and it's something specifically within this file.

 

As far as I can guess, then, it's something to do with linked tables and such like. Is there anywhere I can find out what tables are linked, where it's trying to use the ODBC to get to etc? I don't suppose that anyone has actually had dealings with this software and can at least sympathise with me?

 

I'll fire off an e-mail to the company who made it now but to be honest, I have more faith in edugeek getting me an answer than the company who made it.

 

Thanks in advance... I may disappear soon as my eyes hurt from staring at Access now. Can't remember the last time I saw it used outside of a GCSE lesson, bleurgh indeed!

[Guest TheLibrarian]

I am not going to offer any comment one way or the other about TEAM.

 

It could well be that your ODBC connection for that version of TEAM is no longer valid.

 

Check the ODBC that the older version uses.

 

Here's our current ODBC settings ripped from my registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBC.INI\Team]
"Server"="sqldbsvr\\team"
"Database"="Team"
"Description"="Team 64bit SQL Database"
"Trusted_Connection"="Yes"
"Driver"="c:\\windows\\system32\\sqlsrv32.dll"
"(Default)"="Team"

 

I don't know if this will help in anyway, good luck.

[sonofsanta]

That might be the problem... there are no entries for TEAM on either my local machine or on the file server that the .mdb resides on.

 

No idea how to fix that, but at least I know what I'm fixing now, thanks!

[Guest TheLibrarian]

Unfortunately I know little and nothing about TEAM, we (the royal we) use it here, but (thankfully) I don't personally have any need to use it or support it.

 

We do have a T: drive mapped to a location on our MIS server, then I believe the TEAM Access database is copied to a local directory and run from there.

After that, as I understand it, the Access database uses ODBC to connect to the SQL server.

 

That is pretty much the sum total of my TEAM knowledge.

 

Best of luck sorting it.

[robk]

I think there used to be two access dbs, one with the front end the other with the data in it.

 

Have you migrated from SIMS by any chance? If so you may find a team db on the sims SQL server.

 

Thats the route we took, though we left the team system just before the sql stage.

[sonofsanta]

TEAM resides on the mapped T: drive here as well, coincedentally, although it's just a file server rather than the MIS server.

 

And yes, we did migrate from SIMS around January afaik, and Serco now uses the SIMS2005 MSSQL server instance, so there may be a clash there, something else to investigate.

 

As for databases - well, there's Team_2162 that is the Team database itself, and also a TEAM_Management3.1.mdb in the same folder. There's then a folder called KGGSdata with some MDBs in it but they seem to be aroudn a couple of years old and are probably useless in terms of data accuracy anyway.

 

Even more entertainingly the e-mail I sent to the address listed in the User Guide just bounced

 

Thanks for all your help guys, I really do appreciate it, it can be very frustrating getting a handle on these problems sometimes.

[sonofsanta]

Update ahoy!

 

The same version of TEAM does indeed reside on our MIS server, which does indeed have the ODBC details in the registry for TEAM itself. If I run the Access file on the MIS server it works - if I copy that file over to the file server and run it, it fails. I may well just see if the file can be run from the MIS server instead of the file server, as only the ICT teacher needs access, so if he gets access we could be away...

 

Thanks again, you've led me right to the door of the answer!

[sonofsanta]

Result!

 

The registry settings were the problem all along, thanks Librarian - having looked at the MIS server (thanks robk) and spotted the TEAM ODBC settings in there, all I had to actually do was export the registry settings, import them into a test computer, modify them slightly to C:\WINDOWS from C:\WINNT and the database file held on the file server ( T: ) now works as it should.

 

Fantabulous. Thanks!

Edited December 9, 2009 by sonofsanta
Stupid smilies!

[Guest TheLibrarian]

Heh, congrat's!

[robk]

Nice to hear its now working. Might have to do the same thing here shortly....

[MACIT]

Hmmm we used to use team here, It was the first thing i kicked out based on the fact its like a GCSE project as opposed to a professional MIS system that is built for purpose. It does come close to the functionality of SAM especially in terms of data integrity.

 

I have spent the last 12 months moving over to sims assessment manager and whilst i could pick flies with that system generally is extremely robust and i would recommend it to anyone.

 

The migration from Team has been a long road so far but gradually im seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The approach i took was to export all data from team and import into SAM so that we have historical lookup. I have maintained the Team SQL database for now but i will be removing it soon (will keep a backup just in case)

 

just my perspective.