Office 2007 at the movies

Yesterday the Office 2007 evangelism team sponsored an outing to Crossroads movie theater in Bellevue. Everyone from DPE, plus a few other Office-related folks, were invited to attend the new movie "The Da Vinci Code," and before the movie started we did a demo of some of the coolest features of Office 2007 that allow developers to merge the worlds of data and documents. It was fun to demo Office on a huge movie-theater screen!

First Don Campbell showed off how easily the Office clients can be customized, with an application that integrated a back-end CRM system (Microsoft Axapta) with Outlook through the use of simple web services. The application included custom task panes, ribbon extensions, and many other cool features, all designed to allow workers to stay in the Office suite while they work with CRM data.

After Don's demo, I demonstrated some of the power and flexibility of the Office Open XML file formats, then Christin Boyd covered workflow and Mauricio Ordonez wrapped things up with a closeup look at how Excel Services can leverage spreadsheets for large-scale browser-based solutions.

Scott Burmester, the PM of the Office 2007 evangelism team, organized the event. Here he is handing out Office 2007 popcorn buckets afterward containing free t-shirts, Office Noir comic books, and copies of Beta 2.