Mac Access front end Question (Don't shoot me)

This is mostly a business question, with the usual dollop of politics, and the tech is (as usual) probably secondary.

You’re in a Microsoft Windows shop, and the shop is already deep into and is clearly going deeper into Microsoft tech.

Whether your shop has a plan for databases and related services here, and for how this is all going to be secured and how accesses will be authenticated and logged, on backups, on uptime and database recovery and potentially clustering, current scale and growth and geographical distribution requirements, the available budget too of course, or if the shop is just incrementally headed toward Microsoft tech “for reasons”?

I’m not sure what a “split Access databases” means in this context. Several different Access databases running locally on the same box, or potentially on different Windows boxes, maybe?

As for your tech question… Can you operate a front end for an Access database, or a front end for Microsoft SQL Server or PostgreSQL or Filemaker or a hosted database at Azure or elsewhere, on macOS or iOS or iPadOS or other clients? Sure. Clients connecting using ODBC or JDBC would be a common path there, or with a database server running your own services, and various tools will connect into those.

Alternatives to Microsoft Access: https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-access/?platform=mac

Forum postings aren’t all that well-suited to these discussions, and discussions with sales reps and with tech reps will ~always sell you their products and solutions, too.

I wouldn’t touch Access (as a local database) with a barge pole, but that’s your call. It works for what it does of course, and quite well, but I’d really want a better handle on the data. If on the Microsoft path, I’d look for a dedicated database and dedicated database server; SQL Server or PostgreSQL or MariaDB or otherwise. Access used as a front end to that database, sure. You’ll get to decide whether that database runs local, or hosted.

Might want to look at existing business packages and customer relationship management system, as well. Apptivo, Zendesk, Sugar, Zoho, Odoo (community or paid), there are various vendors in this realm.

As an alternative to Windows Server and Exchange Server and Sharepoint, there’s NextCloud. There are other choices there, too. Windows Server, SQL Server, etc., are not cheap.

Put differently, I wouldn’t start this quest by assuming I need to build my own custom environment. (I’ve done that. It’s a lot of work. Ongoing support, too. And the features that can be provided tend to lag the features available in commercial packages, as there just isn’t enough time or skills or budget for building ~everything.) (Yes, there are times when a fully-custom management system investment is appropriate. Is that day today?)

Oh, and from long experience in IT, please don’t ever assume a “three to five year project” is going to be anything other than permanent. In IT, temporary apps and services often (usually?) become permanent or thereabouts, pending a large migration that itself tends to get deferred.