doncho

Office Live Overview for Developers

doncho — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:05:44 GMT

This is a screen cast recording of Office Live as a platform for developers to build on and customize.

The topics covered include:

What is Office Live?
Opportunity for partners to build on the platform

Customizing the Private Site
Office Live Business Applications and Workspaces
Developing Custom Applications (Business rules, Data, etc.)
Data Connectivity
Workflow
Customizing with SharePoint Designer

Customizing the Public Site
Customizing with Site Designer and Page Editor
Data sharing across private and public site

Integrating with Office applications
Integrating with Smart Client applications
Client side mashups (Virtual Earth, Office Live Web Service APIs)

Warning: this recording contains PowerPoint Slides as well as a short demonstration of a customized Office Live site. The slides were necessary to introduce some core concepts and diagrams. If PPT slides hurt your eyes then consider yourself warned :)

Duration: 31:57

Creating a Word 2007 File from Scratch

doncho — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 23:28:16 GMT

If you save an Office 2007 document in its default format, and then review the XML files stored in the .docx (zip) container, you might conclude that Office Open XML is complex. And it can be, because it has to be able to represent everything in that Office document. But it doesn't have to be. In this Hello World screencast, Office program manager Brian Jones shows how to construct a minimal Word 2007 file from the ground up.

You can do the same kind of thing in Excel 2007. In a three-part series on his blog -- part 1, part 2, and part 3 -- Brian shows how little XML is required to create a spreadsheet, populate it with data, add functions that operate on the data, and apply formatting.

Because it's now possible to create Office 2007 documents in these ways, using standard XML-oriented tools, developers on all platforms can now much more easily make information in other formats available to users of Office 2007.

Office Open XML enables round-trip interoperability between Word 2007 and Mindjet's MindManager

doncho — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:30:33 GMT

MindManager Pro 7 is a visual outliner from Mindjet that "enables companies and individuals to work smarter, think creatively and save time by revolutionizing the way they visually capture and manage information." In this screencast, Mindjet's Michael Scherotter demonstrates a solution that deeply integrates a MindManager map with Word 2007.

When this solution exports a map to a Word file -- in Open XML format -- there are two levels of integration with Word. First, the contents of the map are rendered as XML. Second, mechanisms for interacting with the map are added to a new tab on the Word ribbon. MindManager has a notion of tasks, for example, with associated names and dates. These carry over to the MindManager tab on Word's ribbon, where the same kinds of interaction are supported by Word macros. Because the macros are included in the Word file, it's stored as a .docm (macro-enabled) file, rather than simply a .docx (XML) file.

Word users can not only interact with the map, they can also reflect their changes back to MindManager users. This round-trip interoperability is accomplished entirely with XSLT transformations in both directions. The solution itself is a C# add-in to MindManager.