Access DevCon 2025, the biggest online event of the year for Access, will take place on April 10+11. In the last few days we have completed the conference agenda. It essentially reflects the current situation and position of Access and VBA.
1-3 are about the latest news on Access from Microsoft and from the developer/market/community point of view. The new VBA support for Modern Charts is a positive sign with regard to new features for Access, if it proves really useful in Colin's presentation.
4-7 The sessions about Microsoft Graph and Power Automate deal with possible ways out of what is currently the most severe problem for many Access developers and applications: Microsoft's decision to break out Outlook from COM and VBA, ultimately from the Windows and desktop world.
In contrast to the struggle with New Outlook, the session on TwinBasic and the use of AI in Access development is future-orientated in a more positive sense.
8-10 These sessions will deal with tooling for Access developers, all of them provided by third-parties. This is no coincidence, as most of the newer tools have been coming from the global community for years. Since the Access tool market is not easy for a number of reasons, we want to support these efforts and products, make them better known and make Access developers aware of their capabilities.
11 Even the best Access skills and applications have to be marketed and sold to customers, but many (not only Access) developers are lousy salespeople. That's why I make sure the mix of topics includes organizational or business tips. This time Juan Soto, who owns one of the larger companies in our small-scale sector, will be delivering this session.
So far, more than 70 Access developers from a dozen countries have registered for the two-day conference. We hope to end up with well over 100 participants again.
