Doug Mahugh

Developer Tools for Office 2007 Beta 2

If you're looking to get started on developing software with Beta 2 of the 2007 Microsoft Office System, you'll need more than the free Beta bits. You'll need WinFX .NET 3.0, VSTO, various SDKs, Visual Studio extensions, and more.

Mark Bower has put together a handy list of where to get everything you'll need to develop solutions with Beta 2.

Dan Bricklin Interviews Alan Yates

Speaking of FUD (below), it's refreshing when you hear two class acts calmly discussing the state of their industry.

Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet, interviewed Alan Yates, GM of Office business strategy, at a Microsoft reception at TechEd Monday evening, and Dan has put it on his blog as a podcast. There's no cheap shots and no hype, just a frank discussion of the Google spreadsheet announcement, and some good high-level information about related topics such as Infopath 2007's support for rich forms in browsers and how Excel Services enables organizations to publish and share Excel spreadsheets in a centralized fashion.

Dan's blog and his podcasts are consistently thought-provoking. Check them out here.

Living In The Past

There have been some strange FUD-based arguments put forth around file formats lately. You'd think people would feel good about the openness that the industry has embraced: ODF is now ISO-ratified, and Open XML is moving rapidly through the Ecma standards process. The debate has shifted from "who has the best proprietary format?" to "which is the most flexible and capable open format?" -- that's great news for users, right?

Of course it is. But some folks still seem to fear that the sky is falling. Joe Wilcox, for example, has recently posted a skeptical take on whether Open XML is truly open.

Hey Joe, a lot has changed since you started beating that drum over a year ago! It's time for all of us to work to make these open standards better, and stop trying to force the world into a single approach. Don't let yourself become the Hiroo Onoda of file formats. :-)

Office Business Applications

Office Business Applications, or OBAs, are a new breed of business solutions built on the 2007 Microsoft Office System. These applications feature the familiar people-ready interfaces that users already know and love in Word, Excel, Outlook and Sharepoint, combined with back-end data from line of business (LOB) applications and MOSS 2007 sites.

Two converging trends make OBAs possible. The first is the increasingly ubiquitous presence of internet connectivity. Most white-collar workers are always connected to the net, and this allows for new creative options for integrating applications.

The other trend that makes OBAs possible is the evolution of Office's developer APIs and extensibility options. The rich set of new developer features in the 2007 Office System include custom task panes, ribbon extensibility, the Business Data Catalog, Open XML file formats, and many others. These options allow developers to quickly and easily develop Office-based interfaces to back-end systems that would have been difficult or impossible in the past.

People-ready OBAs require minimal training, because the user interface is built around the applications people are already using. And they're highly configurable: many of the developer extensions in 2007 Office System use simple XML-based declarative programming, and others use simple yet powerful new APIs such as the Workflow Foundation or the .NET 3.0 packaging API.

OBAs are all about closing the "results gap" that has traditionally existed in organizations that have custom LOB systems. Those LOBs -- whether Dynamics, SAP, Siebel, or others -- provide valuable management reporting and data consolidation/standardization, but they're not where users typically spend the bulk of their time. Instead, users spend their time in powerful desktop applications such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook. And that "last mile" of connectivity is where decisions get made, customers get involved, and the work really gets done. The OBA approach now allows developers to close the gap and integrated back-end LOB systems with the desktop applications users already know and use every day.

Ready to learn more? A great place to start is the Channel 9 interview with Corporate VP Lewis Levin. In it, he talks about the new world of OBAs and how it empowers corporate developers, ISVs, and system integrators.

One of the key benefits of the OBA approach is that you use one consistent topology for web management, document management, and records management as shown to the right. This greatly simplifies deployment and management issues, gives smaller organizations and departments the type of power that was once the exclusive domain of larger organizations. This architecture also enables integrated search across web sites, LOB systems, file systems, and other repositories. Business Data Catalog connectors can be configured for disparate data sources, and users can use a consistent search interface to locate information in a variety of systems.

And just as OBAs don't require users to learn new interfaces, they don't require developers to learn a new toolset either. Developers can use the tools they already know to develop rich OBA functionality: Visual Studio, Infopath, Excel, or Access.

To learn more about how to start building OBAs, check out the Office Business Application Developer Portal. And watch for more OBA-related information coming out of TechEd in Boston this week.

WinFX becomes .NET 3.0

To clarify Microsoft's development-tools strategy and make it easier for developers to understand the growing Microsoft development platform, a new change has been announced this afternoon: WinFX will henceforth be known as version 3.0 of the .NET framework. This does not affect the technologies themselves: all the cool things you've seen coming in WinFX, such as WPF, WCF, Workflow, and other new APIs, will all be part of .NET 3.0. Only the name has changed, and nothing else.

To make it perfectly clear, here's what's happening:

For more information about the thinking behind the change, see S. Somasegar's blog. This is a great simplifying move that will help clarify the messaging around all of the emerging tools and technologies that make up WinFX .NET 3.0.

Open XML at TechEd and Codeplex

If you're going to be at TechEd in Boston next week, be sure to check out Brian Jones's presentation on the Office Open XML file formats. It's Wednesday at 5:30, and Brian has all the details on his blog.

If you've been doing any development around Open XML since the release of Beta 2, head on over to OpenXmlDeveloper.org and share what you know, or get your questions answered. We're starting to see more activity now that Beta 2 is out and the working draft of the Ecma spec has been published.

A good example is Wouter van Vugt's handy Package Explorer utility, which was posted on Codeplex today as a shared-source community development project. Other Open XML projects will soon appear there as well, so now's a great time to start ramping up on Open XML development.

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

If you're doing complicated CSS markup, or just doing something simple like hacking up the CSS on your MSDN blog (for example :-)), there's a tool you must have: the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar.

It adds the above toolbar to your browser, which can be used to quickly and easily drill down into the details of the structure of the page you're viewing: the DOM, the HTML and CSS markup, image sizes, and so on. It also has handy features for resizing your browser to specific resolutions such as 800x600, selectively disabling CSS or images or Javascript, and -- my favorite -- a way to put an outline around every div, table, or other arbitrary element on the current page. When you're trying to rip off other people's great ideas for standards-based web design (er, I mean "trying to get creative"), this thing is a Godsend.

It works with Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7, and the combination of the features mentioned above and IE7's well-implemented tabbed interface makes for a very productive combination. Go get them both -- they're free!

VSTO Cypress: Full Support for Office 2007!

If you're a VSTO developer looking to get a head-start on Office 2007 development, life has been complicated lately because the available versions of VSTO didn't support Office 2007. Well, as of yesterday life got simpler with the release of "Cypress," a a free add-on for Visual Studio 2005 that enables you to build VSTO solutions for the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

The VSTO team blog has all the details here. There's also a very informative video on Channel 9 that my colleague Christin Boyd helped put together, in which KD Hallman and Eric Carter talk about what this release means for the future of VSTO development.

Cypress includes application-level add-ins for Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Visio, as well as programming model and runtime support for the ribbon, custom task panes, and Outlook forms regions.

Why the name Cypress? I haven't heard the official reasoning, but it's interesting to note that Cypress Island (in Washington's beautiful San Juan Islands) is located roughly between Orcas Island and Whidbey Island. Oh, and Whidbey was the code-name for the last release of Visual Studio, while Orcas is the code-name for the next/upcoming release of VS. Hmm.

No time to learn Office 2007? Start here ...

The 2007 Microsoft Office System has so much new functionality and so many new features that it's a bit intimidating. Where do you start learning?

You can download the beta, of course, and many people have done just that -- there were 500,000 downloads in the first two days it was available. But if you've been too busy to do that, or you can't install the beta for some reason (fascist IT policies, for example :-)), here are three links to help you get up to speed quickly on what's new in Office 2007:

1) For the basics of what's new, go to the 2007 Microsoft Office system preview site. If you only have a few minutes, just take a look at the video tour of the new user interface.

2) For developer information about how to customize Office, the Office Developer Center is the place to start. There's a lot of great information there that has until recently only been available to developers under NDA in the Office early-adopter programs, but now everyone can learn the details of how to customize Office and how to integrate other applications with the 2007 Office System. The What's New section is a good place to start, and it also includes a comprehensive list of the most active blogs from the Office team.

3) MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) 2007 is a huge topic, especially now that Sharepoint has been consolidated with things like Content Management Server, Forms Server, and Excel Services. The Servers section of the Office Developer Center is a good place to start. Another interesting resource is the WssDemo site, where you can get a hands-on feel for how MOSS 2007 works. There's an interesting collection of MOSS 2007 screenshots on that site here.

Google's Spreadsheet: Excel It Ain't

Google has decided to enter the spreadsheet business, and starting today they're taking applications for participation in the beta. It will be some type of web application, with an HTML-based thin-client UI, but most of the details haven't been announced yet. You can take an extremely simple tour here, but it's just three screenshots and a few bulleted items describing bare-bones spreadsheet functionality.

The press is describing this as a competitor to Excel, which is a stretch. Google's offering will be a simple "spreadsheet maker" application for people who don't want or need the richness of Excel, and there don't seem to be many people in that market to date. There have always been low-end web-based spreadsheets available, and existing products like Thinkfree haven't made a dent in Excel's popularity. In fact, Excel's reach continues to expand, and the new features in Excel 2007 will surely accelerate that growth.

Excel offers a rich interface that empowers users to create spectacular spreadsheets quickly with no formal training. After looking at the simple tour above, check out the new Office UI to get a feel for how the experience of using Excel compares to Google's plans. Speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Another behind-the-scenes aspect of any spreadsheet application is the documents that it creates: what formats are supported, and what types of functionality can be saved in those formats? Google's plans say they'll support CSV, XLS, and HTML formats. So users will have a choice between the complex and fragile binary XLS format, or the extremely limited functionality you can save in a CSV (just columns of text and numbers) or HTML document (same thing, with some pretty formatting options added). There's nothing in Google's plans that can compare with the interoperability offered by Excel 2007's support for Open XML.

Dan Bricklin, the guy who invented the concept of a computerized spreadsheet (i.e., Visicalc), is watching Google's plans closely. His latest project, WikiCalc, is an attempt to provide a reasonably good web experience for collaboration on spreadsheets, and it has some interesting features such as a simple straightforward way of connecting cells to web services, or the capability to include any arbitrary HTML markup within cells.

It's interesting that Google is apparently offering a product that's a subset of WikiCalc, aimed at the same market. I'd say Google is competing more with WikiCalc than with Excel. Or, as Don Dodge points out, they're competing with OpenOffice. But to call this a competitor for Excel is like calling Gmail a competitor for Outlook. Remember when people were saying that? :-)

For more information about Google's plans, see this article on eWeek today, or Don Campbell's blog post on the topic.

BI and Data Warehousing Webcasts

Office 2007 will deliver a wide array of new BI capabilities, especially when combined with the BI and data warehousing features of SQL Server 2005. If you're new to BI and DW, or just new to SQL 2005, there are four info-packed TechNet webcasts coming in the weeks ahead that you'll want to check out. You can learn about SQL Server's BI and DW now, and be ready to build on that knowledge with Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 when it's released later this year.

Here are the details, with links to sign up or get more info ...

Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) Using the Kimball Method (Level 200)
When: June 6, 2006
9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time
Presenter: Warren Thornthwaite
Real success in business intelligence (BI) is defined by both short and long-term results. For the short term, you can win with top priority, data quality, appealing to broad interest and high value. Long-term success however, requires constant growth and expansion, as well as a solid, well-designed foundation. Join this webcast to learn how to build a strong, scalable Microsoft BI architecture. Learn about the basic Kimball Method, the data warehousing/BI Lifecycle, the three tracks of the development phase, and many more details and issues you would be hard-pressed to anticipate on your own.

Designing a Scalable Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence (DW/BI) System (Level 200)
When: June 20, 2006
9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time
Presenter: Joy Mundy
When you are building a data warehouse / business intelligence (DW/BI) system, scale is likely to be a major concern. Either you have a large system now, or you hope to grow to have a large system; or you have a small system but a tight budget, and you want to do more with less. What does large scale even mean? Is it determined by data volume, the number of users, complexity, or something else? What are the most important factors to consider? Join this webcast to learn techniques for addressing these and many other DW/BI issues. The session introduces and explains the Kimball Method lifecycle, and shows how to apply it to a scalable DW/BI system.

Using SQL Server 2005 Integration Services to Populate a Kimball Method Data Warehouse (Level 200)
When: July 11, 2006
11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time
Presenter: Joy Mundy
How do you combine the tasks and transforms offered by Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) into a real extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) system? In this webcast, we present design patterns for building an application that is maintainable, auditable, and scalable to populate your dimensional Kimball Method data warehouse and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services database. Learn best practices for overall system design, for populating dimension and fact tables, and for populating the audit dimension.

Getting Started with Data Mining (Level 200)
When: July 17, 2006
11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time
Presenter: Warren Thornthwaite
Join this webcast for a comprehensive overview of data mining from a database development perspective. We begin with a discussion of the business value and uses of data mining, such as prediction and forecasting. Learn how to detect anomalies, and how to recognize scenarios for which Microsoft data mining technology is best suited. Using a typical business-driven approach to data mining, we show how to identify data mining opportunities, and cover the practical elements needed to make it work well, such as data preparation, model building, and validation. We then examine the output, consider different implementation methods, and conclude with recommendations on how to maintain your data mining solution.

BDC Metadata Generator

If you're wondering where to start in learning to create BDC( Business Data Catalog) connectors to back-end relational data sources, here's a tool that can save you time: Jonah Burke's Database Metadata Generator. It's a Codeplex project, so anyone can download it and use it, or download the source code to see how it works.

The generated metadata is pretty simple for now and doesn't support all of the options that the BDC provides for, but it's a great learning tool and its capabilities will likely grow as others contribute to this community development project.

Adbobe Picks a File-Format Fight

The last two weeks have seen a big increase in the amount of press coverage and blog discussions of file-format issues. Working draft 1.3 of the Open XML spec is out, Office 2007 Beta 2 was released, and now Adobe is threatening legal action regarding Office's built-in support for the PDF and XPS formats.

My colleague Don Campbell forwarded me some information about the Wall Street Journal piece that broke the story this morning, but if you're not an WSJ subscriber you can also read the story in an article on Cnet now.

Brian Jones's blog covers the basics of what's going on regarding Office and PDF, and there has already been quite a bit of heated discussion in the hours since Brian posted his perspective this morning.

Bottom line, Office 2007 is ship without the "save as PDF" and "save as XPS" options (which we've all seen in the beta versions). Instead, those will be available as separate free downloads, which is much less convenient for the customer. And that's still not enough for Adobe, it seems: they want Microsoft to charge for PDF support, otherwise they're threatening legal action. Microsoft has even offered to ship Flash and Shockwave with every copy of Vista worldwide, and that's not enough to satisfy Adobe's lawyers.

PDF is a strange bird. It's a so-called "open standard," but Adobe retains control over who can use it and what they can do with it. Ironically, this threatened/rumored lawsuit could do more to limit PDF's future than anything Microsoft could or would do. And when you look at the downright incestuous relationship between PDF and the Mac, as well as the built-in PDF support in products from Corel, Sun and others, it's a bit hard to take the current posturing seriously.

Here are a few more blogs with more information and perspective on this issue:

• Long Zheng: The evil companies are the ones that say “Microsoft is evil”
• Jerry Ham: Office 2007 PDF support in jeopardy - When is an open standard not open?
• PCPlus: Microsoft under fire. Again.

Stay tuned, this is an issue that will likely grow much larger soon. Users want the simplicity of being able to publish documents in fixed digital form directly from the software they use to create those documents, and nothing Adobe (or Microsoft) does will change that. Another thing Adobe can't do much to change: more PDF documents are created in Microsoft Word than in any other software.

Sharepoint as a Platform

There's some interesting info on Microsoft's presspass site about how various developers are building on the Sharepoint platform. Learn more here.

We're seeing a lot of creative work taking place in the Sharepoint community these days, and it's good to see some of our partners in the Office TAP program on the list.

Bangalore GTSC

I came across an interesting video on Channel 9 today: an interview with Mandar Naik about the growth of Microsoft's Global Technical Support Center in Bangalore.

Coincidentally, I was in Bangalore for an Office developer workshop in March, and had a chance to tour the brand-new building being constructed for the GTSC. Pali, the local developer evangelist, drove me over there on his scooter and we looked around. I snapped a few pictures -- that's Pali in the pool shot, in the break room at the GTSC. Hey, where's the pool room in Building 18?