Developing on Office System 2007
Past few months I have been working more on Office 2007 and development around it. I must say it's fun, though before i started working i wondered what can a tech person do around Office. In fact i still find lot of people not understanding what it means when someone says 'Office 2007 for Developers'. What matters is how you utlize the whole of Office System 2007 which includes a set of clients and servers to build an end to end solution. And this definetly makes office 2007 very interesting for developers and architects
We had developed a POC around Office 2007 for the MS Office launch using Office Beta 2 and VSTO SE. Working with VSTO SE has been very exciting. I have seen people working on information bridge framework earlier. However the object oriented approach and also easy integration with Sharepoint server makes office developement with VSTO more comfortable. And the BI features in Excel are very interesting. Excel Services is definetly a features that has lots of business value.
One of the toughest things was deployment and i hope the next release of Orcas would take care of that. Because for an enterprise implemetation of Smart office clients what's most important is the deployment strategy. And this is something i find most challenging.
The link for the video of the solution developed can be found here. (copy paste the url on the browser)
http://directory.partners.extranet.microsoft.com/SolutionPage.aspx?i=1&cat=&SolutionID=5883&pid=0&vid=0
Some of the features I explored here were
- User Interface development on Office 2007 with Visual Studio Tools for office and Office interop services and Office Document format (Ribbons and Task panes).
- Using MS Excel Business Intelligence Features (KPIs, charts etc)
- Using Sharepoint Excel Services (Excel on the web)
- Integration between Office apps (MS Excel to Powerpoint)
- Deployment and Sharing of information with Sharepoint 2007 document library (powerpoint and excel libraries)
Also the other thing i am working on is the Performance Point server which is also going to be part of the Office family.
Performance Point Server by itself has lots of integration with office, like Visio for strategy maps, and also with MS Excel.