Office 2010 Developer at SPC & “What’s the end-user value?”
Whew! What a week at the SharePoint Conference! Let me re-cap some highlights for you and talk for a moment about "Real User Value".
On Monday, I delivered a session called "What's New in Office 2010 for Developers". It was very well attended, and the demos came through 100%. I laid out the investments we made in this release and why they matter. One of the best slides is the one you see here:
My demos showed nearly every thing in this list working as part of an end-to-end enterprise demo. But, just listing off and show a bunch of technical things is not enough. The features must add up to Real 'User' Value. IOW: technology for its own sake is a poor argument for purchasing or upgrading software. At SPC, we placed a special "real user value" slide in every presentation slide deck that had to do with Office 2010 client. In each presentation we emphasized what the developer investments in the Office/SharePoint platform mean to real users, users who will never touch a line of code or know what Dim or Using mean in programming syntax. Here are the common value themes that you should know as you learn about how to extend and customize the Office experience.
- Familiarity of Office applications
- Reduces training time
- Increases productivity
- Streamline business processes and tasks where people "live"
Even though I've been a solution developer for many years, I'm still an end-user. I dread having to learn some external system and adapt to its foreign UI etc. to get my work done. And, I'm not alone. By using Office applications as the vehicle to deliver functionality to your users, you are giving them a familiar UI. You are making them productive in less time.
Another aspect of real user value is the reduction in the time and complexity in business processes. For example, instead of requiring users to go to an external site to find content that they then copy/paste into Word, wouldn't it be great if they could search and find the external content from within Office where they want the content to land? And, by providing them with drag/drop functionality or a simple click to add the content to the document, you are saving them more time and reducing inaccuracies that creep in when people do a lot of manual operations.
Office and related products are secure footing for your business productivity solutions. Solutions you develop can save people time—not five minutes a day but HOURS. I have seen it play out in the real-world over and over again.
I'd love to hear what kinds of solutions you are creating. My enthusiasm for Office solution development has grown again here at SPC as customers have told/shown me what they are doing with Office development. Surely, our best days are ahead of us.
Rock Thought of the Day:
I was working out yesterday and listening to Modest Mouse's The Lonesome Crowded West—I consider this in my top 20 albums of the last 20 years. It's daring yet vulnerable, ragged yet precise. It's a record that will still be beautiful, honest, and unlike anything heard decades from now. The song "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine" and "Cowboy Dan" are as original as the first rock-and-roll song ever played.
Rock On