Understanding Office 2007 development

The Microsoft Office system evolved from a suite of personal productivity products into a comprehensive, multifaceted, and integrated system. Building on a solid foundation of familiar tools, the Microsoft Office system today includes applications, servers, services, and technologies designed to work together to solve a wide array of business problems. For example, the Microsoft Office system:

• Simplifies content management for large enterprises
• Enhances collaboration with coworkers, partners, and customers
• Increases employee self-sufficiency

In addition, the 2007 release of Microsoft Office embraces open XML standards in order to enhance collaboration and interoperability across applications and organizations in ways never before possible.

Using the shared workspaces available in SharePoint Server 2007, information technology (IT) departments can collaborate over corporate boundaries as never before.

With the adoption of open standards-based technology, Microsoft Office replaces the proprietary binary formats used in previous versions with an open, fully documented, royalty-free format that is based on industry XML and ZIP standards.

The 2007 Office system also significantly improves productivity with the new Office Fluent interface, a new user interface that makes Microsoft Office applications easier to learn and easier to use.

Building robust, manageable, and intelligent solutions

With its integrated set of servers, services, and programs, the Microsoft Office system provides developers with the tools to create sophisticated solutions that are robust enough to meet the requirements of the most complex and demanding business environments.

Microsoft Office interactive developer map
The Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that helps developers visualize the different programs, servers, services, and tools that will help them build solutions. It allows them to drill down to each product and technology and learn about new features, objects, Web services, namespaces, and schemas required to extend Microsoft Office and build custom Office Business Applications (OBAs).

Developer roadmap for the 2007 Microsoft Office System
Download this poster to view a developer roadmap for the 2007 system.

Powerful and extendable development tools

The Microsoft Office system contains a comprehensive set of tools and technologies that enable developers to implement and deploy custom solutions quickly and easily. The following paragraphs describe some of the many new technologies that are available in the 2007 Office system.

• Office Fluent interface
  The Office Fluent interface is a new and extensible user interface that replaces menus, toolbars, and most of the task pane UI in Access 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and Office Word 2007. The new UI is more efficient and is designed to help you discover all that Microsoft Office has to offer. Using XML and a conventional programming language, developers can create and extend Office Fluent components.

• Application level add-ins
  Visual Studio Tools for Office includes application level add-in support for the most popular 2007 Office System applications including Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath, and Visio. Add-ins can be safely and easily loaded, unloaded, and managed. The 2007 Office system offers the ability to create custom task panes that can be used to dock application-specific features and information to different areas of your screen.

• Open XML Formats
  The 2007 Office system introduces new file formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, called the Open XML Formats. The new Open XML Formats improve file and data management, data recovery, and interoperability with line-of-business systems. The new file formats are compatible with Microsoft Office XP, Microsoft Office 2003, and Microsoft Windows 2000 SP4 and later.

• Document Inspector
  The Document Inspector allows you to examine documents for personal, hidden, or sensitive information. You can use built-in Document Inspector modules to remove unwanted information more easily.

• Primary Interop Assemblies
  With the 2007 Microsoft Office system Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA) redistributable, developers can create applications using the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development environment instead of developing and configuring connections using the COM-based object models.

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
  Windows SharePoint Services is a component of Microsoft Windows Server that allows teams to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services also serves as a platform for application development. The next version of Windows SharePoint Services takes full advantage of Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 and the core Microsoft .NET 2.0 runtime. Components such as the Web Part Framework, MasterPages, and Web Virtualization are now provided by the .NET runtime rather than by Windows SharePoint Services.

The Microsoft Office System products and technologies

Explore the following table to discover more of the products and technologies available in the 2007 Microsoft Office system.