To demonstrate the anonymous access capabilities of an Access 2013 web application we downloaded the latest Federal Healthcare pricing information and created an app on Office 365 at

http://catfi.sh/obamacare

You can type in your county name and browse all of the plans and providers in your area.

No registration or signing in required.

All of this was created without writing a single line of code. Pretty cool stuff.

Microsoft Office 365 provides anywhere access to your familiar Office applications, email, calendar, video conferencing, and most up-to-date documents, across your devices – from PCs to smartphones to tablets. Choose to run it the way you want with enterprise-grade security, IT controls and flexible deployment options that let you run it on-premises, as a hosted service or as a hybrid of both.

However, even an enterprise-class productivity and hosting solution like Office 365 will not fully meet the Access web database needs of all customers. An On Premise or 3rd Party Hosted Access Services 2013 implementation helps provide focused, reliable solutions for the following common customer needs:

1. Full control of SQL Server security: Access 2013 allows for the automatic creation of 2 SQL Server user accounts, one with read-only privileges and another with read-write. While that is useful, some customers would like to extend this model to multiple user accounts. By creating multiple SQL logins via SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) you can create a much more complex security model for applications that want to leverage the Access 2013 web database information stored in SQL Server. Password complexity and aging requirements can also be enforced on these accounts.

2. Full control of the network firewall: Many Access 2013 applications require extended security to comply with corporate or regulatory requirements. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) security requirements are a good example of this necessity. In a self-hosted or 3rd party hosted solution you have enough firewall configuration flexibility to lock down your entire database by imposing restrictions on the network perimeter based on TCP/IP address ranges, machine names, and network protocols. A combination of these restrictions can be imposed to address any security mandate.

3. Render http links in the web browser control of an Access 2013 web database: The browser control is a powerful feature in Access 2013 web forms that allows you to call external resources into your application. Office 365 requires https for all external links which limits the use of browser based resources that do not support https. This restriction can be lifted in a self-hosted or 3rd party hosted configuration.

4. Customized backup: You can create a backup rotation scheme in SQL 2012 for the Access Web Apps that mirrors the site collection backup routine in SharePoint. This allows for a synchronized full fidelity backup of the SharePoint site and the Web Apps with multiple restore points. We recently assisted a customer who required a complete snapshot of their SharePoint and Access Services environment to be available for rollback to 24/47/72/96 hour recovery points. In addition, the second and fourth snapshots needed to be available in a secondary data center in the event of a problem with the primary facility. All of this is easily accomplished in a hosted configuration where both the SharePoint and SQL Server environments are completely controlled by the hosting organization.

here is the Access 2013 Quick Start Guide with tutorials for MS Access 2013:

Publish Your Web Database with Access

As part of the January 2013 patch cycle Microsoft has introduced an update for Access 2013. You can use Windows Update or direct download to update your system and both 32 and 64 bit verisons are available. What does this patch accomplish ? The KB article alludes to to “stability and performance improvements” without any additional details.

Here is a screenshot of an unpatched system:

And after the patch is applied: