Multiple authors contributed to this book, ultimately resulting in eight chapters that cover each of what we thought to be important areas within OBA development. We unfortunately could not cover every area, but where appropriate, each of the authors has added additional resources at the end of his or her chapter for additional consultation. Further, each of the authors either works for the Office product group or the Visual Studio product group, thus bringing some great experience into the fold.
Here is a quick summary of the contents of Programming Microsoft Office Business Applications.
Chapter 1 (Rob Barker, Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft)
This chapter provides a good introduction to OBAs and the different technologies that comprise OBA development. Specifically, it provides an overview of the OBA (and Office) platform capabilities, services, and main technologies developers can use to begin building OBAs.
Chapter 2 (Paul Stubbs, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft)
VSTO 3.0 is an important component technology within Visual Studio 2008 that helps you create client-side customizations and SharePoint workflow. This chapter provides an introduction to Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) 3.0, and illustrates the different types of things that developers can do to build rich smart-client components to their OBAs. It provides both Visual Basic and C# examples to illustrate how you can extend Office applications such as Excel, Word, and Outlook and take advantage of the Office object model.
Chapter 3 (Steve Fox, Program Manager, Microsoft)
Business intelligence can mean different things to different people but it represents an important element in enterprise solutions—especially ones where business decisions are made. This chapter introduces you to the different ways in which you can develop business intelligence into your OBAs. Whether it be through smart-client solutions (for example, extending Excel 2007) or through SharePoint development (like using Excel Services to integrate with Excel 2007 spreadsheets), this chapter provides the developer with a number of examples and walkthroughs that illustrate how to build and integrate business intelligence into your OBAs.
Chapter 4 (Joanna Bichsel, Program Manager, Microsoft)
A core part of OBAs is the ability to integrate with Web services—because in many cases you will use Web services to connect to your LOB system. This chapter provides an overview of a recruiting solution that consumes Web services in the client and server to illustrate how developers can integrate Web services using VSTO and MOSS.
Chapter 5 (Fox)
Social networking is becoming an ever-important part of the enterprise solution. This chapter provides you with an overview of a number of different social networking features that you can take advantage of—some of which are MOSS-specific, but also one that integrates third-party social networking environments (for example, Facebook) with MOSS.
Chapter 6 (Barker)
MOSS is an increasingly important solution in the enterprise today. It is also a critical part of developing and deploying OBAs. This chapter provides an overview of how SharePoint is critical to OBAs and the types of tools support that developers should look out for.
Chapter 7 (Erika Ehrli Cabral, Site Manager, Microsoft)
Integrating workflow into solutions enables developers to take some of the burden off of information workers and have the system manage key processes within OBAs. This chapter provides an overview of how developers can build and deploy SharePoint workflow to manage business processes within your OBA.
Chapter 8 (Stubbs)
After you’ve built your OBA, you obviously need to deploy it somewhere. This chapter provides an overview of how you deploy client-side customizations (built using VSTO), server-side components (SharePoint components), and integrations between client-side customizations to SharePoint.