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It is sometimes difficult to remember the corporate office of the recent past. Think back 5 or maybe 10 years. For many of us, that isn’t long ago. However, from a technology perspective, we are talking about an era that might seem as distant as the dark ages. Sure, personal computing was taking off and the Internet was in its infancy. Not every company had a web site, and the average business user in a corporate office had very little exposure to the technologies that seem commonplace today. Remember when only the technically proficient used spreadsheets? Remember when email was a productivity tool and didn’t require labor-intensive filing and sorting? This trip down memory lane lends some perspective as to how far workers have come to embrace the technology solutions IT offers. Unfortunately, the amount of information that workers have to interact with increases daily, as does the proliferation of often-siloed software systems trying to provide work-related solutions. Today, many organizations find themselves in a state where information and labor are duplicated. Often, workers take more time finding and constructing information than analyzing it and making decisions. It is here that technology has an opportunity. The opportunity is to provide more-intelligent tools that focus on the work the corporate business user needs to accomplish. It is in this area that this book will explore common challenges and scenarios and their solutions.

is a term that is used to describe Microsoft’s collaboration platform widely. More specifically, this term today refers to two distinct applications: Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Windows SharePoint Services provides the foundation for the platform and is actually a component of the Windows Server 2003 operating system. It provides core functionality such as the ability to quickly provision collaboration sites, and a sophisticated document repository featuring collaboration necessities such as versioning, checkin/checkout, as well as a metadata system. Whereas WSS provides collaborative sites to facilitate teams of users, MOSS provides features to the enterprise. With MOSS, the focus is on distributing information, application integration, search, and content-management features targeted beyond basic document sharing.

Microsoft Office 2007 is the latest edition of a long line of productivity applications that have become commonplace on the desktops of information workers. Though the years, the Office brand has extended to new applications like InfoPath, Communicator, and Groove. It has also gained enterprise servers in SharePoint. Yet its core continues to be Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Information workers use these four applications to generate numerous files that hold organizational information. With each new edition of this software suite, Microsoft not only focuses on the spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and email, but enhances the ability for these items to participate in the enterprise. These enhancements include collaboration, enterprise search, and interaction with business data and line-of-business systems. The 2007 release steps up the support for extension by developers. In this chapter we will provide an overview of some of these enhancements and point out which solutions in the book incorporate them.

Microsoft Office is one of the world’s most used information-worker applications. This level of exposure and recognition has made these tools an enticing area for customization as developers wish to extend a tool that users are already comfortable with. Developing with Microsoft Office has traditionally meant developing in a COM-based world. This began to change with Office 2003 when Microsoft shipped primary interop assemblies (PIAs) as part of the advanced installation. These PIAs opened Office to the .NET developer community and their managed code projects. A primary interop assembly enabled a Visual Studio developer to write code against the Office applications by adding a reference in the project. This assembly took on the responsibility of translating between the COM and managed code environments. Even with the PIAs, this development was not for the faint of heart. .NET developers often struggled. Their code had to deal with the way Office maintained object lifetimes and they had to contend with lots of COM plumbing. In addition, the managed code solution was limited to running outside the process of the Office application. What was missing was a layer between the PIAs and the developer’s custom application. Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) fills that gap. Visual Studio Tools for Office extends the Visual Studio environment to support the development of managed code solutions for Microsoft Office. With VSTO, the developer can create solutions that leverage Microsoft Office applications, including the construction of add-ins, custom task panes, ribbon customizations, and smart documents.

The collaboration sites of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) provide a focused workspace for users to share information to achieve a goal or complete a process. Often these sites are customized by an organization so they meet the exact needs of the type of collaboration the group of users is trying to perform. Usually each site represents a specific instance of the process and has the appropriate lists and libraries to store the necessary information. Though the site adequately services the needs to the group for the specific instance of the process, it does very little for the user who may be involved in many of these sites. Even though each site has the same type of content, the user would be burdened with accessing each site during the day to make content changes. A better solution would be to consolidate the content from these similar sites into a single tool for the user. There the user could maintain the content for all of the sites and periodically save her changes back to the corresponding lists in SharePoint sites. Ideally the tool would also provide this information in a way that supports visualization techniques such as charting. In this chapter we will detail how, as a developer, you can extend Microsoft Excel to construct such a tool. In fact, we will make the list data available to the user even if she is offline and not able to reach the SharePoint sites.

Information workers have become accustomed to modeling business calculations with spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel. These spreadsheets may be updated on a time interval and distributed throughout the organization. This distribution is likely through email. There are many consequences to this strategy. Since there are so many copies of the spreadsheet, the organization loses its sense of what the authoritative version is. The spreadsheets themselves may be very large and laden with computations that make it unresponsive on an average desktop computer. In addition, the distributed spreadsheet contains the formulas and calculation logic that may be intellectual property that needs to be protected. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a new application service called Excel Services that supports the publishing of such a spreadsheet so that users can view it using only their web browser. This means that there is one version of the truth, no large files to distribute, and the spreadsheet is processed on the server using its resources rather than the user’s desktop.

Organizations often have sets of document templates that are used throughout their enterprise. It is often a challenge to make sure that information workers are uniformly using the latest template and capturing the appropriate metadata everywhere the document templates are used. It is not unusual for some templates to share common data elements such as customer information or product details. Often authors, who are responsible for working with these templates, are retyping, cutting and pasting, or otherwise repetitively importing data elements into the appropriate places in the document. Furthermore, they may have a completely separate application to locate and maintain the data set. In this chapter, we will detail how, as a developer, you can construct a solution on SharePoint site to enable users to merge list data into Microsoft Word documents.

Windows SharePoint Services provides an enhanced storage system that facilitates collaboration. This system improves upon old collaboration techniques of simply emailing documents back and forth or dropping them in a file share. Relying on email is an awkward system, as team members are never sure they have the most up-to-date version of the document and consolidating the changes becomes a laborious task. File shares are also limited in that files dumped there are often difficult to find, users have no idea if the file is currently being edited by another team member, and versioning is reduced to a Save As operation. SharePoint’s system of Web-enabled content databases provides a rich experience for the team working on the document. The environment provides check-in/check-out functionality, versioning, metadata, search, and an entire web site for storing lists of data related to the creation of the document.

Windows SharePoint Services provides the enterprise with easily creatable workspaces where information can be collected to support the sharing of information among users working toward a common goal. This goal could be many different things, including preparation for an event, execution of a business process, or even materials for a project. Often, organizations build presentations as an output of this collaboration or for routinely reporting on the status of the team. Microsoft PowerPoint provides users with a powerful canvas to construct presentations. However, information workers expend too much effort and time to locate, duplicate, and organize this information into the presentation. Not only are we looking to reduce this effort; we also want to increase its accuracy. The presentation’s authors are likely retyping, cutting, and pasting, or otherwise manually importing content. So in this chapter we will detail how, as a developer, you can extend PowerPoint to provide a tool that is capable of building out slides populated with content stored in a SharePoint site.

Windows SharePoint Services provides the enterprise with easily creatable workspaces where information can be collected to support the sharing of information among users working toward a common goal. This goal could be many different things, including preparation for an event, execution of a business process, or even creation of materials for a project. Often organizations build presentations as an output of this collaboration or for routinely reporting on the team’s status. Microsoft PowerPoint provides users with a powerful canvas to construct their presentations. Like in the previous chapter, we will look to reduce the amount of work placed on information workers to put the presentation together. In this chapter we will assume that the organization has a preconstructed template for presentations of a particular type and that building the presentation is a repeatable process of putting site content on slides. So for this chapter, we will completely automate the construction of a presentation by combining site content with the provided presentation template. This construction occurs server-side by a custom web part that leverages the new Microsoft Office Open XML file formats.