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· Rich user experience
· Data-driven architecture
· User-driven business applications
· User participation
· Collective intelligence
· Low cost deployment and management

Web2.0 – 1, Microsoft Way !

 

 

 

Bringing Web 2.0 to the Enterprise with the 2007 Office System

 

 

Microsoft Corporation

Published: December 2006

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abstract

The new technologies, application design patterns, and business models commonly referred to as Web 2.0 have effected enormous changes in how people publish and consume information on the Internet. Users can now publish their own content through blogs and wikis, combine data and content from different sources to create their own user experiences, and form online communities to share knowledge and work collaboratively. Businesses are now looking to many of these same concepts to tackle their own complex challenges.

This white paper explores how the Microsoft 2007 Office system allows enterprises to adopt Web 2.0 ideas and technologies to create high-value, user-driven applications for the Internet and intranet. It describes the platform technology investments in the 2007 Office system that allow IT professionals and developers to create flexible, role-based business applications. The paper closes with a brief look into future trends that Web 2.0 and the 2007 Office system make possible.

 

 

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.

This White Paper is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT.

Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation.

Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property.

Unless otherwise noted, the example companies, organizations, products, domain names, e-mail addresses, logos, people, places, and events depicted herein are fictitious, and no association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, email address, logo, person, place, or event is intended or should be inferred.

© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Microsoft, .Net, ActiveX, Excel, FrontPage, Groove, InfoPath, Live Communication Server, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

 

Contents

Introduction    1

The Evolution to Web 2.0    2

The Elements of Web 2.0    3

Technology Components    4

The 2007 Office System and Web 2.0    6

Technology Investments    6

The 2007 Office system in Action    9

Basic Building Blocks: A Rich User Experience    9

The Next Steps: Data- and User-Driven Applications    12

User Participation    13

Collective Intelligence    14

Office Live    16

Future Directions    17

Appendix A: SharePoint Products and Technologies    19

Services    21

Appendix B: Developing the 2007 Office System Applications    22

Building Solutions on SharePoint Products and Technologies    22

 

 

Introduction

The recent history of the Internet has seen enormous changes to the old models of how people publish and consume information on the Web. Instead of simply viewing information on static Web pages, users now publish their own content through blogs and wikis. Instead of visiting many different sites for information, users now combine data, content, and applications from different sources to create their own user experiences and applications. Users are taking these technologies into their own hands to form rich online communities where they can share knowledge and work collaboratively.

These new technologies, new application design patterns, and new business models—commonly and collectively referred to as Web 2.0—are transforming the shape of both public Internet and private intranet applications. They represent a significant opportunity for businesses that can embrace the changes and harness the creativity of their employees, partners, and extended customer communities and the collective value of their knowledge and intelligence.

Of course, with this new power and freedom come significant challenges. Integral to the power of Web 2.0 technologies is the ability for users to create their own applications according to their own needs and preferences. This creative activity is done "at the edge of the network"—that is, the users themselves grow and develop these applications, rather than relying on developers at a central IT department. Therefore, to get maximum value from these applications and at the same time avoid disruption and security lapses, enterprises must strike a balance between empowering their users on the one hand and centrally managing their IT and data assets on the other.

This white paper explores how the 2007 Office system, through a set of programs, servers, services, and tools, delivers a platform that allows enterprises to adopt and benefit from this sort of Web 2.0 evolution without unnatural disruption. It demonstrates how the 2007 Office system enables rich business solutions that embody the following set of Web 2.0 characteristics:

• Rich user experience
  
• Data-driven architecture
  
• User-driven business applications
  
• User participation
  
• Collective intelligence
  
• Low cost deployment and management
  

It also describes the platform technology investments in the 2007 Office system that allow IT professionals and developers to deliver a new breed of flexible and role-based office business applications. The paper closes with a brief look into the future and new potential business models for organizations to consider.

 

The Evolution to Web 2.0

Web applications have undergone significant changes over the last decade. Ten years ago, there were no Web applications, merely sites composed of static HTML pages and occasional sparks of interaction. Companies that had a customer-facing Web site were able to connect with Internet-savvy consumers and use their Web site as a channel to market their products; business plans were focused on the number of "eyeballs." Corporate intranets were used mainly as places to post news and company policies. At the turn of the century, as the number of Internet users increased, a new e-commerce business model emerged. Web applications became more interactive through technologies such as ASP, JSP, PERL, and PHP. Visitors to a corporate Web site were now able to not just look at products, but buy them and have them delivered to their door.

Then, just as the stock market and popular media were lamenting the dot-com collapse, another more powerful phenomenon began taking root. Web sites became destinations for communities of users to talk to each other, not just read content. The new breed of Web technologies that emerged enabled savvy companies to use the Web to their advantage like never before, offering the opportunity to establish a dialogue with their customers and collaborative work spaces for their employees. In order to deepen their relationships with their customers and compete more effectively, companies sought richer and more immersive application experiences for their users. Companies worldwide began reexamining their technology strategy and exploring creative ways to increase demand, revenues, and business efficiency.

Today, that phenomenon continues and has been dubbed "Web 2.0." In essence, it is the collective realization that recent technology plus the rapid spread of broadband access combines to allow companies to fundamentally alter the way their customers, partners, and employees interact with applications, with each other, and with information online. There is a discreet, though by no means all-inclusive, set of technologies in the market today that are generally referred to as "Web 2.0" technologies that enable the Web 2.0 phenomenon. They are the tools companies are using to provide richer experiences and enable their user community to interact with each other, information, and applications in the easiest way possible.

Web 2.0 is more than rich Web applications, however. It is about fundamentally changing the way people interact with content, applications and other users; it is about applications that promote far more participation from the community at large. With the huge and ever-increasing number of Internet users, the Web is beginning to achieve its initial promise: a platform for harnessing and promoting collective intelligence. People are no longer just consumers of content and applications; they are participants, creating content and interacting with different services and people. More and more people are creating blogs, contributing to knowledge bases such as Wikipedia, and using peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies such as BitTorrent. Sometimes referred to as the network effect, this increase in participation and content creation presents new opportunities to involve the user in deeper, more meaningful ways.

The Elements of Web 2.0

Properly understood and deployed, Web 2.0 technologies, methods, and patterns can be adopted by the enterprise to great effect. They can boost overall organizational productivity and create a much stronger customer and partner connection. To capitalize on this opportunity, enterprises require an agile infrastructure with the tools and out-of-the-box solutions that allow users to interact with content, applications, and people in powerful new ways. In this section, we focus on a few of the key concepts that make this possible:

Rich User Experience

Providing users with a single place to do work increases productivity, minimizes training costs, and encourages deeper adoption and usage. Context shifts, which occur when users must switch between many different sites and applications to accomplish a task, can kill productivity and ruin any user experience. Whether they are customers, partners, or employees, users want the right tools at their fingertips at the right time. They want to access information and applications whether they are connected or disconnected, whether they are using a mobile device or a laptop, or whether they are using a thin client or a smart client. In the enterprise, a rich Web experience often means allowing users to use programs they already know to interact with new hosted services. It also means allowing them to take content offline or on the road. A rich, dynamic, responsive user interface enables people to drive the business, rather than limit them to the constraints of fixed applications and screens.

Data-Driven Architecture

Data is the fuel that powers all information technology. The new breed of applications uses technologies such as XML and Web services to allow systems of all types to exchange data with greatly reduced integration complexity. Enterprises can use these technologies to access the critical business data that exists in many different formats and locations such as line-of-business (LOB) systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) databases, documents, Web sites, content management systems, and archives. Metadata techniques can be used to help describe that data, making integration easier, making data more relevant to users, and streamlining reuse across many applications. Users can combine data and processes from different systems in their own "mash-ups," creating entirely new applications.

User-Driven Business Applications

With a Web 2.0 platform, users can create applications specific to their own needs. The shift of application development to the edge of the network is perhaps the most dramatic change for many organizations used to top-down solution models. However, the new models acknowledge that organizations simply cannot anticipate all of the creative solutions that occur at the edge in business units. On the Internet, these edge-created applications have been dubbed "mash-ups." In the enterprise, they are often called composite applications.

However, many current composite application strategies fall short by focusing on simply resurfacing applications in a new user interface (UI) and failing to provide true user enablement. To capitalize on the user-driven application opportunity, enterprises will provide departments and users with a managed environment and familiar tools that allow them to easily customize or create their own workspaces and solutions. A flexible infrastructure that provides management and control while scaling from power-user configuration to professional developer solutions is the critical enabler for this opportunity.

User Participation

Today businesses understand that individual productivity is only part of the picture. Organizational productivity is the result of users collaborating and sharing content with one another. Enterprises can boost organizational productivity by making participation in Web communities as seamless and easy as possible. This approach can help not only new Web applications but existing applications as well. Many large system deployments such as ERP and CRM have been plagued by low user adoption, resulting in low-quality information in the system and robbing companies of expected return on investments. By making input easier and streamlining reporting and analysis, this new breed of application drives user adoption and unlocks the value of existing systems.

Collective Intelligence

Enterprises with large employee, partner, and customer bases are beginning to realize the value of collective intelligence: the knowledge found in employees' heads and in the databases and unstructured documents found across the organization. Search and collaboration are at the heart of this opportunity. When people can quickly find critical information and subject-matter experts, and then work seamlessly together, productivity can soar. New technologies such as dynamic workspaces, wikis, and enterprise search for people and data deliver a platform for collaborating on complex and creative tasks. Increased access to information enables valuable analysis, while easy publishing of insights ensures that others can benefit from these insights. The result is a positive feedback loop that amplifies the power of many people working together.

Low Cost Deployment and Management

The concepts behind Web 2.0 strike a new balance between the control and administrative ease of centralized systems and the flexibility and user empowerment of distributed systems. Web applications are by nature centrally deployed, so central services can manage applications and entire desktops automatically. While this style has always appealed to central IT organizations, it now becomes more appealing to users because they can reassemble the services available to them in the ways that suit them best. It also offers the potential to host or outsource applications and still manage them by allowing users to "pull" the applications to their desktop.

Technology Components

Beyond these high-level concepts, Web 2.0 includes some key technologies that successful companies should evaluate as a central part of their infrastructure.

XML

XML is a self-describing data format that is easily understood by many applications and systems. XML provides the ability to define specific vocabularies to describe your organization's information, enabling nearly seamless data interchange. For example, if every system throughout your organization and partner value chain describes purchase orders by using the same language and format, all the systems and applications that process expense-related information can seamlessly share data, vastly reducing integration complexity.

XML Web Services

XML Web services are interoperable software components that support computer-to-computer interaction over a network. XML Web Services can expose content and application interfaces to other systems, enabling dynamic scenarios such as mash-up or composite applications. Web services are a core component of solutions that integrate multiple applications, platforms, and databases.

Ajax

Ajax is a term coined in recent years that stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax development techniques can be used to build Web applications that function like desktop applications, without the slow, tedious page refreshes of early Web applications. This ultimately results in a much smoother user experience, which boosts productivity and user acceptance.

Rich Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

As its name implies, RSS delivers content through the use of syndication services, which provide an easy way to broadly publish information inside and outside of the organization. With the exploding amount of content and applications, syndication is an important step in obtaining maximum exposure and stickiness.

Search

As demonstrated by the Internet search engines, search has become a first-class entry point for many types of tasks and is often the user's first tool when trying to answer questions. Organizations can capitalize on this natural behavior by providing users with high-quality enterprise search results that are relevant and include multiple data types such as databases, documents, and people in a single search.

Metadata Services

Metadata is literally "data about data." It is a set of information that describes the rest of the information in an organization. It may describe business entities such as purchase orders, invoices, and expense reports, or it may describe database records and document structures to make them more reusable. Metadata helps with discovery of data sources and enables data reuse across applications and services by providing a common, central description of data structures and their behavior.

Collaborative Workspaces

Collaborative workspaces are places for groups to meet, talk, share information, and keep a record of members and activities. They provide a selection of configurable tools for storage, communication, display, item tracking, and so forth. These dynamic workspaces allow new group members to quickly come up to speed and provide the ongoing context tasks for projects.

Common Web Application Framework

Due to its sheer size, the Internet is rife with different application frameworks. Enterprises, however, cannot afford this kind of infrastructure fragmentation. To maximize return on investment (ROI), enterprises must standardize on a common Web application framework for easy application creation and deployment. A strong building-block approach to application design allows users to quickly create business applications based on reusable components.

The 2007 Office System and Web 2.0

The set of programs, servers, and services in the 2007 Office system represents a huge breakthrough in terms of organizational productivity, data integration, and solution platform capabilities. By employing many of the Web 2.0 principles and technologies described earlier, the 2007 Office system delivers out-of-the-box solutions that enable users to leverage business data and participate in business processes through a number of easy-to-use interfaces. Whether the information and processes are exposed in commonly used tools such as Microsoft® Office Outlook®, Word, InfoPath®, or Excel®, or exposed through a Web browser connecting to a server running Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, the 2007 Office system ensures that users can participate at the appropriate time by using the tools that make the most sense. Further, it provides a modern business application platform that prepares organizations for future opportunities by enabling them to easily adapt to rapidly changing business demands and it unlocks the ROI of existing systems.

Technology Investments

Beyond providing rich out-of-the-box solutions and a critical mass of platform technologies, the 2007 Office system provides an infrastructure on which enterprises can build, deploy, and host user-driven business applications. By building on top of the 2007 Office system, enterprises can take advantage of the services and Web 2.0 characteristics of the 2007 Office system. The goal for this release is to give users the choice of tools and give developers and IT professionals a strong, enterprise-ready, secure and extensible platform.

XML

XML is at the core of Office system 2007 spanning client and server technologies. the 2007 Office system introduces a new Open XML format that allows much easier programmatic access to Office files. Microsoft Office InfoPath uses XML for gathering information, with the flexibility to incorporate data from many sources in a single form. On the server side, XML surfaces in a variety of ways allowing enterprises to style the content in the format they want by using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT).

XML Web Services

The 2007 Office system server technologies expose data and application interfaces through XML Web Services. By using tools and technologies such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, the XML Web Part, the Business Data Catalog, and Forms Services, XML Web Services can be consumed with ease. There has also been a significant amount of work done with the Office client applications to interact with the server technologies by using XML Web Services as well surfacing applications and content in the client to make it easier for users to participate.

Ajax

Microsoft was one of the pioneers of Ajax applications with Outlook Web Access (OWA) 2000. Ajax development techniques have been used throughout the 2007 Office system server technologies to provide a rich, interactive browser experience. Ajax techniques have been used extensively in Office SharePoint Server features such as Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services, OWA, and Communicator Web Access (CWA). Customers can also leverage these techniques and behaviors in their own solutions. For more information, please refer to the Basic Building Blocks: A Rich User Experience section in this white paper.

RSS

Office SharePoint Server 2007 exposes RSS feeds for data. For example, tasks, blogs, document libraries, contacts, and even search queries can be RSS enabled. On the client, Outlook 2007 includes a new feature for RSS aggregation that is integrated with Windows® Internet Explorer RSS capabilities.

Enterprise Search

Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers a single search engine for all content types so users can find database entries, documents, Web pages, file shares, people, and more. Extensibility ensures that specific data types are well indexed and that results are displayed in a mode appropriate to your business.

Metadata Services

The 2007 Office system boasts a number of powerful metadata technologies that allow companies to more effectively categorize and reuse a wide variety of information. Content types in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (SharePoint Products and Technologies) allow document contents and behaviors to be specified. The Business Data Catalog allows business entities such as purchase orders and invoices in back-end databases to be defined once and then surfaced in search results, portals, and lists. Other technologies such as data connection libraries make finding important data sources possible for all types of users.

Collaborative Workspaces

Office SharePoint Server delivers an enterprise-grade, template-based workspace environment that is manageable, flexible, and powerful. Users can easily create workspaces with the right set of tools for the job by simply selecting the right template.

Common Web Application Framework

Office SharePoint Server provides a single infrastructure for business productivity Web applications for the enterprise. Through its extensive use of Web 2.0 patterns and technologies, it allows enterprises to quickly develop, deploy, and host applications; these applications then inherit the Web 2.0 characteristics themselves, creating an ever richer user experience. Beyond providing a strong self-provisioning platform, Office SharePoint Server provides rich out-of-the-box functionality in areas such as Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Portal, Enterprise Search, Forms, and Business Intelligence. Deep integration with ASP.NET 2.0 makes Office SharePoint Server a natural extension of the ASP.NET platform and enables skill transfer and software reuse. For more information on how Office SharePoint Server provides a common Web application framework for organizations looking to host rich business applications, refer to the SharePoint Products and Technologies section in the Appendix.

Workflow

While workflow is not ordinarily included in most descriptions of Web 2.0, we feel workflow is important to include in any discussion of enterprise business applications because it represents such a necessary enabling technology, streamlining how groups work together in an organization. Based on the Windows Workflow Foundation, workflow in the 2007 Office system is hosted on the server and integrates with the Office clients to allow complex business processes to be captured and repeated. Built-in workflows support common tasks while extensibility by designers or professional developers ensures flexibility, fast deployment, and future headroom.

The 2007 Office system in Action

This section provides examples of how the 2007 Office system increases organizational productivity by embodying Web 2.0 characteristics. While Web 2.0 on the Internet typically refers to browser-based solutions, in the enterprise, the ease of participation and adoption is critical and therefore we include both browser- and client-based examples.

Basic Building Blocks: A Rich User Experience

The 2007 Office system provides a set of rich Web and client experiences that users can choose. This section focuses on Web applications with the 2007 Office system and provides a few examples of a rich user experience for unified collaboration and communication, business intelligence (BI), and enterprise content management (ECM) solutions.

E-mail: Outlook Web Access

With the 2007 Office system, users can use Office Outlook 2007 or Outlook Web Access (OWA). to manage their e-mail and tasks. By using Outlook, users can take their e-mail offline. However, sometimes users want to access their e-mail from another computer off the corporate network by using OWA. One of the earliest examples of an Ajax application, OWA provides a smooth, immersive user experience, very much like the desktop Outlook client experience. OWA 2007 provides reminders, a rich calendar experience, and access to a user's personal site on Office SharePoint Server.

Team Workspace Sites: SharePoint Products and Technologies and Groove

Information workers in today's business environment must use a multitude of tools and contexts to collaborate. They must be able to share calendars, project schedules, documents, and contact lists both within and beyond the organizational firewall. Team workspace sites must combine both collaboration and communication services, and they must provide adequate security for sensitive tasks. And to be effective, teams must be able to create these workspaces quickly and adapt them to fit their needs. Unfortunately, when IT organizations are asked to implement these workspace sites, the wait is long, the costs are high, and the results are often disappointing. It is almost always more efficient for the information workers to be empowered with the tools to do it themselves with familiar applications.

Microsoft offers an integrated collaboration solution for global teams looking to create self-service workspaces that match when, how, and where they are working. Consisting of SharePoint Products and Technologies and Microsoft® Office Groove® 2007. the Microsoft team workspace solution enables IT organizations to fulfill the need for relatively large and centralized workspaces that support one or more departments, divisions, or business units, as well as the demand for small, decentralized workspaces for ad hoc, cross-organizational workgroups. SharePoint Products and Technologies and Office Groove 2007 enable self-service workspace creation while ensuring IT administrators retain centralized control and management for compliance purposes. Both solutions work effectively out of the box, but can also be customized by IT organizations when integration with existing systems or processes is desired.

With SharePoint Products and Technologies, effective team sites can be deployed in minutes on a single server by the users themselves, without the help of IT services. These sites can support teams for small, ad hoc uses or service departments and scale to terabytes of data and thousands of information workers in an enterprise. Tightly integrated with Microsoft Office products, these collaborative workspaces support meetings, document repositories, shared calendars, and other types of structured and unstructured data. Users can dynamically create, remove, and modify team sites and shared document workspaces for their own projects and content for self-service collaboration. For a more structured collaboration environment that ties into existing business processes, Microsoft provides a range of free application templates that implement specific business processes and workflows such as travel and holiday requests and document change tracking.

Real-Time Communication: Office Communicator

Live Communications Server provides enterprise synchronous messaging. Users can use Office Communicator or Communicator Web Access. The Communicator Web Access server provides an Instant Messaging and Presence client that is hosted in Web browsers. It uses JavaScript and DHTML to implement a rich user interface client to the Live Communications Server. This same set of functionality is also available to developers as a set of Ajax-style interfaces exposed from the Communicator Web Access Ajax Service. These interfaces provide the developer with all of the functionality needed to write LCS client experiences in browsers or on any platform that provides the ability to make HTML requests.

Business Intelligence: Viewing Excel Spreadsheets through a Browser

Excel Services, part of Office SharePoint Server 2007, enables businesses to securely share spreadsheets across an enterprise, making spreadsheets available through a Web browser with far greater control and manageability than has previously been possible.

Excel Services provides two primary interfaces: a Web-based UI for viewing spreadsheets in a browser, and a Web services interface for programmatic access. The Web-based UI, Excel Web Access, allows users to have both interactive and read-only access to spreadsheets in a Web browser by means of DHTML. No ActiveX controls are used, nor is installation of the rich client necessary. The Web services interface enables external server applications to directly access spreadsheet data, making use of their business logic without needing a developer to reengineer it in code. In both cases, only the data that is specified by the spreadsheet author is available, while formulas and other business logic that underlie that data remain protected. Another core benefit of Excel Services is that IT can leverage the server infrastructure to schedule and compute complex calculations.

Enterprise Content Management and Web Content Management

Web Content Management features allow enterprises to delegate Web site management to the same non-technical users responsible for the content. By using only the browser, users can create, edit, review, approve, and publish Web content. The rich WYSIWYG DHTML editing control allows users to create Web content without knowing any HTML.

Forms Services allows enterprises to collect information from customers, partners, and employees without coding any custom applications. Built-in data validation rules help accurately and consistently gather data that can be directly integrated into back-end systems, avoiding redundancy and errors resulting from manual data reentry. The zero-footprint, browser-based forms of InfoPath forms Services enable organizations to extend the rich InfoPath environment far beyond the firewall, without requiring installation of software on the local computer.

Custom Solutions Built on SharePoint Products and Technologies

The SharePoint Products and Technologies browser interface makes liberal use of Ajax development techniques to minimize browser refreshes and give Web users a great interactive experience. Custom solutions built on SharePoint Products and Technologies benefit from the same user interface.

Site actions and list actions are exposed with the click of a mouse through a pull-down menu. This allows users to invoke commands and menus as needed without cluttering the UI. Furthermore, the entire user interface is security trimmed so users only see content and actions to which they have access.

Every SharePoint list comes with a mobile view out of the box, so users can access these Web applications from PDAs and smart phones. For more information on SharePoint Products and Technologies, refer to the SharePoint Products and Technologies section in the Appendix.

The Next Steps: Data- and User-Driven Applications

With 2007 Office client technology, users can also create rich desktop solutions by connecting to and interacting with server-side systems. Office client programs, such as Word, Excel, InfoPath, or others, support extensive connectivity features that enable integration with Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and also provide direct connectivity to most data sources through the use of ADO.NET, XML Web Services, ODBC, and other connectivity methods.

Shared Data Connections

The flexibility of the Office client programs allows them to connect to existing systems by using common methods and industry standards, enabling deep integration with relatively little effort. InfoPath and Excel share a common data connection library, enabling non-technical users to take advantage of predefined data connections when building form templates and spreadsheet reports. IT departments can preconfigure and provision these data connections to the appropriate users, which provides a more effective method of containing and managing data access to critical LOB applications and systems.

Business Web Applications

As we have described above, applications based on SharePoint Products and Technologies can be provisioned by users on demand. A SharePoint site is based on a site template. SharePoint Products and Technologies come with a variety of SharePoint site templates and features. After a site is provisioned through a Web browser, a user can add Web Parts and create SharePoint lists as needed. Users just choose the applications they want and drag and drop them onto the site. With the 2007 Office system, Microsoft is releasing a set of 40 SharePoint templates that can be provisioned as well. And with the help of SharePoint Designer, users can create custom applications based on SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is based on Microsoft Office FrontPage® technologies. The new name reflects the emphasis on creating and customizing Microsoft SharePoint Web sites and building no-code, sophisticated composite applications on the SharePoint Products and Technologies platform.

Without writing code, you can integrate different data systems to create DHTML-based Web pages.

User Participation

The 2007 Office system encourages user participation by enabling information workers to engage in a wide variety of activities, by using the tools with which they are most comfortable.

Publishing and Reusing PowerPoint Slides

PowerPoint slide libraries allow users to quickly publish and consume Microsoft Office PowerPoint® slides from a browser or right from Office PowerPoint 2007. Sharing slides and presentations in this manner can save time, spread knowledge, and improve quality across the organization.

Blogging

SharePoint Products and Technologies ships with a blog template, which allows users to provision their own blog very quickly. They can author postings to the blog from their browser or they can use Office Word 2007 to author their postings and publish them directly to the site.

Collaborate without Borders

Microsoft Office Groove 2007 is a collaborative environment that helps teams to work together more effectively—anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Working in Office Groove 2007 workspaces saves time, increases productivity, and strengthens the quality of team deliverables. Teams—particularly teams that are geographically spread out—often find that the materials they share and the work they do lack context because not everyone is in the same place and connected to the same data and systems. Groove workspaces provide that context by putting all people, tools, and data in one place—the workspace—and making them accessible to all team members right on their computers.

Collective Intelligence

The 2007 Office system provides solutions that allow organizations to harness collective intelligence. A few examples are listed below.

Wikis and Blogs

The terms wiki and blog have become synonymous with the increased freedom of discussion offered by the World Wide Web. Although the Web has always provided a platform for expression, blogs and wikis have removed many of the technical and financial barriers that existed previously. Blogs and wikis enable anyone, whether a technical expert or a casual browser, to write Web pages and publish them for other Internet users to see.

Blogs and wikis are not just Internet technologies; they can play a significant role in an enterprise environment. They provide the business services, independence, and collective intelligence that business users need, in a lightweight interface that is flexible enough for any business model. Like e-mail, blogs and wikis are now moving into mainstream business services, and it is important to establish good practice for their planning, deployment, and management—business tools deliver increased productivity only if you implement them effectively.

With SharePoint Products and Technologies, enterprises can readily host blogs and wikis on a single infrastructure and allow users to provision blogs and wikis as needed. Blog and wiki facilities now provide more secure, manageable communications and publication features, which resolve many of the concerns voiced by some organizations.

SharePoint Products and Technologies ships with a blog template. Users can provision a blog very quickly and author their blog postings in the browser or by using Office Word 2007; in either case, they can author their blog posting and publish it directly to the intranet or the Internet.

Aggregation

The 2007 Office system provides a set of aggregation and personalization capabilities that allow users to see the information that matters most to them. For example, users can use Office Outlook 2007 to subscribe to a blog through RSS and then easily search for the specific blog posting they are interested in. Users can broadcast target content or Web applications based on preset audiences or Exchange Distribution Lists. Users can also choose to sign up for alerts for content they are interested in.

Enterprise Search

While blogs and wikis are created for specific uses and audiences, most content in an enterprise is not categorized or targeted. With the amount of electronic content exponentially increasing, it becomes ever more important for users to quickly find the information they are looking for. The 2007 Office system provides desktop and enterprise search that allows users to find content scattered across the enterprise from their desktop, office applications, or a browser.

Social Networking

One of the biggest challenges for any organization is how to take advantage of the wealth of information and experiences that people accumulate in the course of their work but never write down. According to some estimates, as much as 80 percent of the knowledge that exists within any organization is considered to be "tacit knowledge"—information that is undocumented and therefore difficult to access. People leverage tacit knowledge by tapping into their social networks to discover who can help them. In a sense, people are the gateways to tacit knowledge. SharePoint Search brings together the worlds of social networking and expertise location to attack the tacit knowledge problem. We call this space "Enterprise social networking."

Office Live

Sophisticated Web-based business applications are not just the domain of large corporations. Smaller businesses can benefit greatly from the technologies and concepts behind Web 2.0 with Microsoft Office Live.

Office Live is a groundbreaking set of Internet-based software and services designed to help small businesses develop the Web presence required to keep in touch with customers. With Office Live, companies can easily obtain a domain name, create a Web site, and set up company-branded e-mail and instant messaging accounts. They can advertise their business online and even sell their products on the Web. They can also use Office Live to access company calendars, automate key internal and external business tasks, and collaborate with employees, partners, and customers online

Office Live is built on Windows Live, Windows SharePoint Services, and the 2007 Office system. It enables the development of applications that are hosted outside corporate firewalls to be available to affiliate networks of enterprises, enabling extranets and extended workgroup scenarios.

Office Live is currently focused on the needs of small businesses and small workgroups. We will continue to extend its reach and functionality by addressing the needs of individual information workers and larger workgroups.

 

Future Directions

A key element of next-generation Web development for Microsoft is providing a platform for others to add value and build businesses around. The initial set of Web services components available on the Web today (such as mapping, search, customer support, and blog publishing) represent the first examples of the types of Web services that will eventually be made available generally. Combined with new, interactive browser models, we see an opportunity to extend existing capabilities and build new types of applications that benefit our customers and partners.

There are many valuable lessons to be learned from the Web that will inform these platform efforts, particularly as we expose SharePoint Products and Technologies and Office to more and more developers. Lightweight and easy-to-understand technologies (HTML, SOAP), the ability to publish information in structured ways for unintended reuse (RSS), a model that is significantly less complex than past models—these are characteristics we will strive for as we provide opportunities for developers. SharePoint Products and Technologies will continue play a significant role in providing a foundation for assembling these types of applications. We learned much about this type of simpler application creation and customization with Access; even exploring whether Access can be "hosted" to provide the customization and development opportunities that developers desire. Other developer initiatives will be enhanced by expanding on current efforts such as the Communicator Web Access Ajax Service SDK and the Office Live Solutions Developer Program.

At the individual user level, Office has a long history of extending rich desktop experiences with servers and Web services. For example, Office provides a broad range of deeply integrated Web services, ranging from deep Office Online integration, community-tuned help, community-based assistance, and 360-degree feedback through the Customer Experience Improvement Program, to application-specific services such as Outlook Live, Groove Web services, and blogging integration in Word.

In a similar vein, Office has historically enabled "companion" experiences that complement the rich clients and expand collaborative, mobility, and reach scenarios for customers. Examples include Outlook Web Access, Communicator Web Access, Project Web Access, basic content authoring in SharePoint Products and Technologies, InfoPath forms services, Excel Web services, and Ajax-based Web site authoring in Office Live. We continue to explore where it makes sense to complement and extend the full range of Office desktop programs with Web-based scenarios and capabilities. Areas of focus include new scenarios for sharing; collaborative editing and search; enhancing existing online document editing; and roaming, personalization, and anytime/anywhere access to information and documents.

Central to the user experience in the next-generation Web is the role of community. Just as we focused on team-based collaboration in the 2007 Office wave, we will be looking at community collaboration as a key need in the next wave of Office. Although we provide a complete set of capabilities to collaborate and share information, we can do more to support community groups and needs. We have made good progress in the 2007 Office release in providing tools and services to support governance and top-down policy, but we will also work to provide more communal tagging and navigation capabilities, the organic creation of content and groups, and the addition of unmoderated content or comments. In addition, the meshing of inside and outside the firewall participation is a unique aspect of community that requires new ways of thinking about policy and security.

For our business customers, we will continue to offer the above services as full on-premise solutions while broadening our offerings of managed enterprise services from Microsoft and partners, as well as unmanaged services for individuals, small businesses, and enterprise workgroups through Office Live. Examples of these kinds of solutions include Groove Enterprise Services and Live Communication Services. We are also increasingly looking at options for enterprise customers that blur the hosted and rich client benefits of our technology. One big focus in this regard will be investing in Softricity as a vehicle for new information worker deployment and management scenarios.

We are also examining the trend of the "consumerization of IT." As expectations are set by user experience and the tools employees use outside of work, IT needs to be able to respond and satisfy these users. A great example of this is the emergence of instant messaging as a business communication capability. We will be looking at how to mesh consumer and business technologies and provide the level of experience and capability in our business tools that employees are starting to demand.

Finally, we will continue to make investments in Office and Windows Live to make Live a platform to deliver next-generation Web services for the Office programs and servers. Whether it is extending your business calendar to include your personal appointments and communal calendars or subscribing to a full set of services to manage a community effort, we expect to provide seamless integration of Web services into Office. We are also exploring diverse ways of delivering services that incorporate the best of next-generation Web services with the control and flexibility of on-premise servers.

 

Appendix A: SharePoint Products and Technologies

SharePoint Products and Technologies comprises Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Windows SharePoint Services is a technology (a component of Windows Server 2003) that enables users to access data and collaborate by using a browser or a smart client. It provides a manageable infrastructure and extensible application platform for improving the efficiency of business processes. Office SharePoint Server, built on top of Windows SharePoint Services, helps organizations gain better control and insight over their content, streamline their business processes, and access and share information. In addition, Office SharePoint Server gives IT professionals the tools they need for server administration and application extensibility and interoperability.

 

 

SharePoint Products and Technologies is built on top of ASP.NET 2.0 and provides a rich set of solutions out of the box and a great set of services that developers can take advantage of when building solutions. Its services architecture provides data storage, application hosting, and a very rich Web application framework that supports:

• A rich browser experience by using Ajax development techniques
  
• Data and application interoperability with smart client technology, such as Office, and other applications through XML Web Services
  
• Application and data services in the form of sites and Web Parts that can be provisioned on demand
  
• Syndication of any data stored in Windows SharePoint Services through RSS feeds
  
• A framework for hosting and creating composite Web applications
  

Web site Framework

The SharePoint Web site framework allows applications to be provisioned on demand without involving IT. Solutions built on SharePoint Products and Technologies that use SharePoint lists to store data inherit the core technology components such as RSS (every SharePoint list can be RSS enabled), an Ajax user interface for collaboration and site administration, application services such as workflow and search, and a set of XML Web Services that expose the content in the SharePoint site.

SharePoint Products and Technologies allows users to quickly provision SharePoint sites and content on demand and allows users to choose the services that they want. As SharePoint Products and Technologies is built on ASP.NET 2.0, it supports the Web Part framework. SharePoint Products and Technologies uses ASP.NET 2.0 technology to deliver its browser UI, and that very much includes the Web Part control set. Web Parts are ASP.NET 2.0 components that users can add/remove/modify at run time, allowing them to see what they want, the way they want it, on their Web pages. Web Parts usually provide the user interface for information services, sets of data, and Web services, and they can be combined, configured, and connected on pages to create composite applications. In SharePoint Products and Technologies, they can be staged in common galleries and reused over and over again across a large number of different sites.

Developers can develop their own custom Web Parts and use next-generation Web development techniques (such as Ajax), and they can take advantage of the SharePoint UI framework and the ability to let users pick and choose the applications they want.

The SharePoint Products and Technologies framework also provides data and application services that can be provisioned on demand by users. A SharePoint list is where data is stored in a SharePoint Products and Technologies application. A list can store different types of information, and Windows SharePoint Services comes with many kinds of specialized lists such as Tasks, Document Libraries, and Contacts. Content in lists can be accessed and acted on using:

• A browser
  
• A smart client application, such as Office, through XML Web Services
  
• An RSS aggregator (every SharePoint list can be RSS enabled)
  
• A mobile device
  
• A composite Web application
  

SharePoint Products and Technologies applications are surfaced through Web Parts. Web Parts, as described earlier, are mini-Web applications that can be configured by end users. SharePoint Products and Technologies ships with several Web Parts out of the box and provides a framework on which custom Web Parts can be developed.

A SharePoint site can be compared to a composite application container consisting of data and an application. A SharePoint site can contain any number of SharePoint lists and Web Parts and is based on reusable site templates. Users create their own composite applications that can help them collaborate, provide business insight, and improve business processes. Web Parts can connect to other Web Parts (Connected Web Parts), providing a great platform for composite Web applications.

Services

Several important services are available in SharePoint Products and Technologies that end users can easily use. Furthermore, these services can be leveraged by custom applications built on the 2007 Office system. Office Business Application services include workflow, the Business Data Catalog, and search.

Workflow

SharePoint Products and Technologies hosts Windows Workflow Foundation and allows users to design workflows by using Office SharePoint Designer. These workflows can be applied to a SharePoint list and rules can be set. Users can provision lists, sites, workflows, or Web Parts on an as-needed basis. Workflow actions are also exposed through XML Web Services. Office SharePoint Server ships with several workflow templates that can be used to set up a number of different kinds of serial and parallel workflows. These workflow templates help drive structured processes and help get information from the community.

Business Data Catalog

The Business Data Catalog (BDC) makes it possible to include data from back-end systems in SharePoint lists, Web parts, pages, and search results. This allows for even greater composite application/mashup scenarios. Information from systems such as Siebel and SAP can be incorporated into a SharePoint site with ease. The BDC is extensible and allows enterprises to connect to any database and line-of-business application by using XML Web Services.

Search

Search in SharePoint Products and Technologies indexes structured and unstructured content throughout the enterprise. Search provides a consistent and familiar search experience, great relevance of search results, functions to search for people and expertise, and the ability to index and search data in line-of-business applications. Search functionality is available through a browser interface as well as an XML Web Service that can be used when developing custom applications.

Appendix B: Developing the 2007 Office System Applications

Building Solutions on SharePoint Products and Technologies

Two of the features that most differentiate Web 2.0 server platforms are their ability to adapt to a wide set of user requirements and their ability to provide services to other applications, allowing for combined, composite applications often known as mash-ups.

SharePoint Products and Technologies most certainly qualifies on this front. It is designed to serve up sites that are based on application templates that make use of a wide variety of services from Microsoft and other organizations. Moreover, SharePoint sites, their contents, and the server environments that host them are designed to provide services to other applications by using SOAP and other HTML-based protocols.

Multiple points exist into which developers can plug their own code into the SharePoint Products and Technologies platform. The information store is designed to be extended with event receivers and workflows. Furthermore, the store is designed to be extended with new field types, metadata declarations, and entirely new content types (collections of metadata and registered events/workflows). The ASP.NET user interface can be extended by using standard DHTML techniques, master pages, Web Parts, and other .NET components.

New groups of components that, taken together, offer new solutions can be packaged as features and activated or deactivated within sites as needed. Specific types of sites, with specific sets of features pre-activated, can be defined and chosen as templates when sites are provisioned. Places exist within both the user and administrative interfaces to add new components and communicate with additional services. This provides a strong self-service framework, empowering users to provision, maintain, and customize their own business applications.

Many of the SharePoint Products and Technologies services are meant to allow users to extend their Web sites with declarative methods. Uploaded spreadsheets become rich Web applications and Web services. Rich, interactive forms with built-in data validation, business logic, and connectivity to the LOB infrastructure solve complex information gathering challenges within business processes. Business data can be immediately repurposed and used in Web Parts and lists, for example, by virtue of being registered in its Business Data Catalog. All of these examples, and others, show what can be done with a declarative development approach, something within the range of users that need to be in control of the Web applications and resources they require to do their jobs.

Custom-defined XML Schema

With the 2007 Office system, organizations can incorporate data from external applications and systems by using their own XML vocabularies. Developers and architects can define and maintain a common data structure between their LOB system, the SharePoint Products and Technologies environment, and Office client programs. This is possible because the Open XML formats of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint support extension through the use of custom-defined XML schemas.

The use of custom-defined schema definitions within Office applications represents a quantum leap forward for interoperability within common desktop applications. Organizations are no longer bound by working within the data structure defined by a software vendor; they are free to choose the language used to define business objects within their organization. This represents a powerful shortcut in solution development; expensive and time-consuming data translations are no longer required.

Information gathering by using InfoPath Client and Server Technologies

The flexible InfoPath environment can be used to connect information from many data sources and present the information in a rich, interactive form with multiple views, user roles, declarative data validation, conditional formatting, optional and repeating sections, and more.

The InfoPath design environment provides an ideal solution for composite applications whose purpose is gathering information. When combined with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and InfoPath Forms Services of Office SharePoint Server 2007, developers have a comprehensive platform to build and deploy composite applications for gathering information through rich clients, Web browser interfaces, and mobile devices. The extensive XML support in InfoPath enables these composite applications to collect and submit information by using standardized languages.

Extensible UI

Beyond the functionality within the client programs for enabling connectivity, the 2007 Office suites offer many possibilities for extension to support the level of customization required in this type of dynamic environment. The extensibility support within the client programs is designed to enable organizations to take advantage of the familiar environment of Word, Excel, and other commonly used programs, providing them access to systems and resources. This, in turn, promotes greater user participation in the enterprise.

Document Information Panel

Combining Office InfoPath with Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 offers organizations a new method for collecting structured data for documents. A new Document Information Panel enables organizations to embed the connectivity, data validation, and other capabilities of the InfoPath environment into Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. The Document Information Panel can be used to collect or present document metadata for Windows SharePoint Services libraries, or it can be used to collect and present information from other LOB systems by using the built-in connectivity of InfoPath forms. The Document Information Panel provides organizations with powerful extensions to documents, presentations, and spreadsheets because it provides a simple mechanism to incorporate external information into content. For end users participating in business processes, this means that information such as required metadata, required business process information, or even structured information within the document can be presented within the context of the familiar Office program, rather than forcing users to interact with metadata or business processes outside the context of the programs they already understand.

Document Action Pane

Office client programs also support an extensible document action pane to provide a contextually-relevant user interface inside Office client applications. Because the Document Action Pane has access to the core application object model and other application interfaces, interactivity between the content of the application document and the Document action pane provides a rich, interactive experience for program users in a context they already understand. For developers, instead of authoring entire applications and systems from the ground up, by using the Document Action pane provides a great shortcut for organizations that seek to incorporate external information into the Office client programs.