Office Business Applications - the developer story
I've spend the last six months talking to developers about Office Business Applications (OBA). OBAs are all about making applications, particularly Line of Business (LOB) systems, integrate more tightly with the different elements of the Microsoft Office platform. OBAs lets you streamline a whole range of common use-case scenarios, reducing re-work and errors, thus saving time for the user. For a more formal and full description of OBAs please visit
OBA Central. For many developers, the key technologies are Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).
So, how do you go about designing and building your own OBA? For Office add-ins you will want to
download Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. It includes the latest version of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO v3.0), which makes add-in development a breeze, through new Office 2007 application level and document level add-ins. These, combined with the Office Ribbon and Custom Task Pane let you create the "fluent UI" experience as they change to reflect the tasks you are doing. Think about the ways in which you could use this new "real estate" to display data in a whole variety of ways, by pushing LOB data into the cells of an Excel spreadsheet or into the body of Word document.
VSTO v3.0 also opens up Outlook to deep application integration which is something many developers have wanted. Outlook Form Regions allow you to take control of many elements of the Outlook UI to display information. Perhaps certain types of email will contain all the charts and data a user needs to make a decision within the body of the reading pane. Or perhaps when you click on an Outlook contact, it also uses Live Search to map the contacts address details or retrieve sales and invoice information. If you know how to program in WinForms applications, you'll feel right at home with VSTO. The latest information can always be found at the
Office Developer Centre.
For portals, WSS provide the ideal platform for building everything from dashboards to custom web applications. In SharePoint, web parts are the basic building blocks and they can be used to surface a whole range of information using either the standard web parts Microsoft provides out of the box, or by building your own. If you already know ASP.NET 2.0, then web part development with SharePoint will feel very familiar. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) provides additional services and web parts that sit on top of WSS, providing features such as graphs and charts through the new server side Excel services engine, or browser based forms input via the new InfoPath Forms Service. Tied in with Workflow or the Business Data Catalog (BDC), it can be used to create powerful systems. Explore the resources at the
SharePoint Server 2007 Developer Portal.
Finally, I hope to see you all at Tech Ed in Barcelona, where I chair the Office track and have some
great sessions lined up.
David Gristwood
Read David's blog here
