ThickMike wrote:

I am writing an application in Access 2000 which travelling employees will
load onto their laptops. As they do not have the Access program loaded, they
will use Runtime.

I anticipate that revisions will be needed over time. Updates might be
changes to forms & macros, new forms & macros, data changes, extra fields in
tables (must not overwrite existing data)

The employees are not techie people and applying an update must be as easy
and straightforward as possible.

Is there a standard way of coping with Updates to the program?

Would I be better off splitting the database into front and back ends?

You *must* split the database no matter what direction you go. See
the "Splitting your app into a front end and back end Tips" page at
http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/splitapp/ for more info. See the free
Auto FE Updater utility at http://www.autofeupdater.com/ to make the
distribution of new FEs relatively painless.. The utility also
supports Terminal Server/Citrix quite nicely.

The free Auto FE Updater program, see my sig below, does not at this
moment in time, handle offline, disconnected systems where the backend
databases which use replication. However it will handle it sometime
soon, likely in the next month or so.

David Fenton has a wiki on the topic. Doing a search should find it.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/