Patrick’s Bytes

From 25th to 27th March 2008, I will be conducted a class for Certified Partners in Malaysia on creating Office Business Applications with the latest Visual Studio 2008 (VSTO 3.0) on top of Windows Server 2008. Windows Server 2008 will be something new to me so I will create a series of blogs on how to setup an SharePoint 2007 + Office 2007 development environment on WS08 later. So stay tuned.

To find out more about the launch of latest Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio check it out here.

There is a contest here asking people to upload tips and tricks videos on Office 2007  and stand a chance to win a Zune 80Gb. The contest ends 27 Feb so hurry and download the video recorder from the same site. There are some Office tips at my blog here, maybe can give you some inspiration.

FedEx’s David Zanca did a demo of their Quickship application at Bill Gates’ keynote at Office Developer Conference. You can check out Bill Gates’ keynote recording here.

FedEx Quickship is a great example on how Office Business Applications can enhanced collaboration and user’s productivity. They have leverage the following OBA features:

1. Quickship toolbar inside Microsoft Outlook 2003/2007.

2. Printing and doc gen to FedEx Kinkos from Word 2007

3. Quickship site template for SharePoint 2007

4. Integration with Office Live

I got the pictures from John Mullinax’s blog. More details here. Some features only available to FedEx customers in US, but you can get a feel of the OBA app with their Flash demo here.

Perhaps the biggest thing coming out from Office Developer Conference this week is the introduction of Office Business Applications (OBA) Composition Reference Toolkit. It is not yet a complete product but offers a lot of promise to enhance collaboration in the enterprise.

The preposition is based on Web 2.0 paradigm called mashup where users can grab data and application from the Internet cloud and create a custom web application themself. One such mashup tool is PopFly from Microsoft; with this tool I can integrate my list of friends from Facebook and combined with Live Earth map I will have an application myself showing me where they live on the map. Popfly requires no coding on the users part and it is an attraction to the enterprise as well . Information workers already familar with Office productivity suite and to a certain extend SharePoint portal, and on the mean developers been building applications module which integrate with both Office and SharePoint. All those integrated modules are later coined the term Office Business Applications. So let the developers buiding the building blocks (in the form of Office addin, SharePoint web part or workflow) of OBA modules, then end users can use a OBA toolkit to combined all the building blocks into the enterprise processes. The OBA maship process is something like this

• User choose the OBA components they want from the toolkit, it could be Office addin, webpart or a form
• User arrange the components into a process
• Provision the OBA app to the OBA server (its actually SharePoint here

 
The toolkit has the familiar Office Fluent UI, shown here is the provision menu

• Wait for OBA server to set the app, it’s shown in the Status window

• User login to the provisioned SharePoint website to access the components (below is a sample app I created without even looking at the HOL and screen shot below shows a link to download the Office add-in in my app)

The content on the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit is completed with

1. The bits in the form of MSI
2. Video intro
3. Installation guide
4. Hands-on lab

You can also check a talk by Javed Sikander who architect the toolkit at Channel 9 here.

Today the MSE team did a Tech Preview to fellow developers on Visual Studio 2008 which actually available for MSDN subscribers late last year and is available for sales now.

My session is about Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) 2008 and a lot of productivity enhancements have been put inside the package in this current version. They include but not limited to:

1. Better UI Development on Office UI
• Form Regions in Outlook
• Custom Task Pane
• Custom Ribbon for Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
• No relearn, leverage on Windows Form Development skill
• Windows Form able to host WPF app and extends this capability via Custom Task Pane
2. SharePoint Workflow development
• No more manual writing of workflow.xml, feature.xml (both are SharePoint feature config files) and deployment script
• Streamline development process from 15 steps to 3 steps in VSTO 2008
3. Word Content Control data binding with VSTO addin
• Bringing unstructured data from Word documents to a structured world
• Able to attach custom XML such as RosettaNet or UNeDoc which as industry based XML schema to Word data.
4. Easy deployment of VSTO - Office Addin via Click Once
• No more reliant on CASPOL
• Transparent to end users

I demo a cool VSTO addin for Word 2007 hosting a WPF user control with colossal effect and acting as a client to a WCF services at the back end. The data access is done using LINQ for XML. After that I will publish

It is based on an article in MSDN Dec 2007 issue but the source codes there is not working for RTM version of VS 2008. Many thanks for fellow MS staff Andrew Whitechapel for making it work for VS2008 RTM.

You can download the slides and working version of the source code here. They are hosted on Windows Live Skiydrive/ Folders.

Slides in PDF

Slides in XPS

Source Code in C#

I will come out with a tutorial for the SharePoint Workflow later and also a VB9 version of the source code. So stay tuned.

Outlook 2007 sits on my desktop all the time and it is really a great application inside the Office suite. Now one startup from California makes it even better, checkout the YouTube video here from xobni (reversal of the word ‘inbox’).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YhpdKa-NgY]

Oracle Business Intelligence blogger  is doing a poll on .NET 2.0 installation out there. This maybe because that the new Oracle BI Add In for MS Office 2007 requires the .NET 2.0 installation. Yes, and I think this is a fantastic OBA adoption here with Office 2007 as the front end to Oracle’s OLAP Cube than creating a new one.

And to my surprise there is a 58% YES (23/ 39) response out there.

This is a screenshot taken from the InfoWorld website about the limited features found in Google App should makes enterprise architect think twice before dumping MS Office. The reports even says Google still using MS Office for most of the productivity works.

As for the ad (in this case its Double Click), word to word matching might not be a good strategy.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/08/23/Google-Apps-no-replacement-for-MS-Office_1.html

Just realize today that I can actually download the whole OLAP cube and browse with Excel 2007 when you offline. Below are the steps:

1. Access the .ODC file online

2. When you click Open, you will fire up Excel and the Pivot Table Field List.

Construct you Excel Pivot Table view. For example I put Reason on Row Labels, Calendar Year, Quarter and Month on Column Labels and Incidents Count on Values.

To take the cube offline, click on Options –> OLAP Tools –> Offline OLAP

Because you don’t have a Offline data file,  on the Offline OLAP Settings window you will see Offline OLAP option is grayed out. Create the data file by click on Create Offline Data File.

 You will be presented by a wizard, click Next on the first screen

Because a real life data warehouse is huge and you might not want every data, you can choose the level of field you want to store in the offline data file. Then click Next.

Then specify the item within the level and click Next.

 Finally specify where you want to store the data file and click Finish

Now you see Offline OLAP option is enabled.

Eric Carter been blogging about new VSTO features inside Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), among them are

• New Document Level Office Project Type
• Sharepoint Workflow Project Type
• Mixing VBA and VSTO .NET managed code
• And there are many post about OBA and mashups as well.