Access 2007 integration with Sharepoint 2007 Tasks list

Question

A customer of ours has an Access 2007 application with a form for creating tasks for upload to a Sharepoint Task List. The user fills in the form (title, status, priority, start date, due date). The user then places check marks next to the sharepoint user names that this task must be assigned to (one task per sp user selected). This data is aggregeated into a TaskQueue table and the tasks are added to the Sharepoint list successfully (through a linked list - i think). The problem is that we need to include zero or more attachments for each task item. Is there a way to do this through a macro, VBA, or some other built in functionality that I haven't learned about yet?

My initial idea was to use a C# windows service that monitors this taskqueue table then uses the Lists.asmx Shareopint web service and the AddAttachment method when given the List item ID and NTFS path to the attached file to add the attachments to the task list item in Sharepoint.

After playing around with Access and setting up a linked table to a Task List in Sharepoint, I found that you can add attachments through the Access 2007 datasheet view. The problem is that you can only select one user or SP group in the Assigned TO field. They have a lot of repetitive tasks to assign to a bunch of separate people.. That's why they developed this form. If anyone has an idea on how to solve this issue please let me know. Also does anyone know of any good Access 2007/Sharepoint integration resources?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

1. have the attachments upload as part of the Access form.
2. load attachments into a Document Library
3. Check off users like they are currently being done
4. Add hyperlinks to the attachments uploaded in step 2 to the Description (rich text) field. (maybe done automatically in steps 1-2)
5. Leave TaskQueue table alone.

This way, 0..n documents can be included. The task list just stores structured data, and the documents are stored in a document library once, and you don't have runaway growth when attaching 1 document to 5 different tasks (resulting in 5 copies of the document).