Office Dev conference keynote continued

  • Article

Bill hands over to Jay Paulus, GPM from the Office team for the demo:

  • shows off excel pivot tables and charts
  • publishing with excel services to the browser
  • designing a workflow
  • used business data catalogue to get data from backend sources
  • constructed a Word document on the server
    • custom XML bound the data
    • renamed as a zip and looked directly at the custom xml in notepad
    • changed one xml node and resaved
    • reopened in Word to show the data bound in the document
  • using a custom task pane showing how controls bind to the data
  • program a word task custom task pane using visual studio to drag controls onto the surface and binding data using xpath and VSTO
  • leveraging logic in an excel services spreadsheet inside a word doc
  • eBay add-in to word showing item watch lists, custom forms in Outlook and addins to drive activities, to-do bar integration

Good demo, bit hard to read the code over the webcast. What this demo really shows is the tight integration we can do because everything is XML. Being able to construct documents on the server, place them into a workflow and build very powerful integration from all the desktop apps.

Q&A with Steven Sinofsky and Bill: interesting comments

  • Mac interop question: DHTML standards are common to mac - including ajax. will test against mac and mozilla browser
  • Writely acquisition by Google: Bill - Google has great search and we'll an even greater web product - citing SharePoint enterprise search capabilities. Provision of document collaboration at a server platform level with Office Live. Sinofsky jokes - we have a rich text editor which shows up from SharePoint in OfficeLive - "I guess we forgot to create a whole company out of that"
  • Forms: broad adoption of InfoPath throughout Office. In browsers but also within Office, eg the workflow in documents - also the properties within documents will be shown in InfoPath. You can use a form and all the richness of InfoPath inside the document properties. Everything you can programme into the task pane.
  • Vista integration: Bill - lot of companies will want to do Vista and Office together even though Office doesn't require Vista. Lightups like save as etc
  • Backwards compatibility: we continue to support the COM model but most apps moving to take advantage of .net
  • Ribbon resistance: will people adapt? we're won't know for sure until its out there with millions of people. It can take only about 20mins to understand the improvement. Take a look at RibbonX which is the object model that you use to customise the ribbon. Its painful to go back to the pre-ribbon. Sinofsky - has a no beta SLA at home but misses ribbon functionality at home.
  • Enterprise migration takes time - what about modular upgrade and back compat? Full import/export back to Office2000. SharePoint carries on working with the browser but richer with 2007 client over previous releases. Won't allow two versions of Outlook but other apps can run both versions or mix and match. Bill: two paths - either upgrade the docs but not preferred way - other way is be able to open and read/edit in all versions avoiding the file upgrade issue.

Ends with video that is not broadcast over the live link