I'm currently building what is more or less a survey app in MS Access 2003. I want data access to be decentralized - users are operating on local data, not centrally stored data.
Users need to be able to send some subset of the survey to another user to be filled out and returned.
Users also need to be able to post the survey (as a file) to a server.
Should I be passing around MDB files? XML? Something else?
It depends on how you see this working. It is easy enough to programmatically link tables in an mdb and zipped mdbs can be emailed, it is generally easy enough to update a main database from Access.
If I understand correctly, and each of the users has access installed, then passing an MDB would be as reasonable an option as any other I can think of. It would probably operate on the same principle as having people pass an Excel spreadsheet around.