Project Launch Calendar

Hello All,

I am new to this board and have a question about your opinion on creating an Access project that will be a project launch calendar for an organization. Basically, there are numerous projects with start and end dates and they need to be tracked every month and Gantt chart type reports are created that how their current status and if they have slipped or not. It is done in Excel now, where are set of people gather information about different sets of projects and at month's end compiles them into one Excel sheet which is then used as the basis for generating some reports through Mail merge and also manual Gantt charts in power point.

So, the idea is to port this system to Access where data is continuosly fed by the users through the month and then at month's end reports generated that are similar to what is produced manually now. My basic questions are:

1) What do you suggest regarding the process of having multiple users interact with Access to feed in data throughout the month, i.e. can this be done concurrently or is there a best practices process of having multiple users interact with the system without disturbing each others work?

2) Is there a sample project or technique someone can suggest that enables production of Gantt chart type or MS Project type visual timeline reports from the underlying data?

Will appreciate any pointers. Apologize to folks for whom all this is very basic.
Thank you