MS Access 2007 as an SME CRM solution?

I am two months in on a new IT support job, in a company with ~100 employees spread across several small offices. The company delivers mentoring and training to long term unemployed people to help them get back into full-time work.

The company is relatively young and hasn't had a dedicated IT person for more than a few months. Consequently the IT infrastructure and staff work flows are a bodged mess that somehow keep ticking along.

Customer data, rather than being stored in databases is edited and stored in shared MS Office 2007 Excel spreadsheets. This is bad enough as it is but these shared spreadsheet files are also replicated across several sites by MS Server 2008 R2 DFS. As you would expect, data disappears and the files become corrupted pretty often.

I would like to come up with a better solution for storing customer data but have little experience with databases.

I am thinking that rolling out MS Access 2007 to all the clients and having them connect to a central SQL server would make a good solution. The database just needs to store a few standard customer details, name, address, contact information, a few UIDs and appointment times, each with a boolean to record whether they attended or not.

I've never set up anything like this before so I would be grateful for any thoughts or advice.

Thanks!