Microsoft Office System 2003


Microsoft Office 2003 allows you to create intelligent business solutions that address a variety of requirements while providing an easy-to-use interface. It is a big mistake to think of Office as just a word processor or spreadsheet. The Office System goes way beyond that simple definition and combines a series of products that allow end users and developers to write managed code, understand XML, and consume Web Services. Combining these features with the familiar Office interface allows Office to become a universal front-end for any application regardless of the system or platform the data is located on.

Many of the products are the traditional set of Microsoft Word, Excel, and Access, but several new ones have been added to the mix. It is important to take a look at the following new features and products that have been added as we will be using these throughout the rest of the book to develop custom solutions:

Microsoft Word 2003: One of the key features of Word 2003 is the native file support of XML. Word 2003 templates can also include an underlying XML schema that allows users to create documents containing XML markup. Developers can create templates based on custom XML schemas and then build intelligent applications around these documents. Word 2003 also provides direct support for Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and XPATH. The native support of these features enables developers to build solutions that capture and reuse document content across applications, process, devices, and platform. XML support enables Word to function as a smart client for Web Services and a host for these intelligent XML-based documents.

Microsoft Excel 2003: Spreadsheets within Excel 2003 can be designed with an underlying custom XML structure. In defining schemas, businesses can implement a flexible data connection between client and server to describe specific business objects. Excel also provides a new tool for mapping these custom XML elements to spreadsheet cells . As with Word 2003, the native XML support enables Excel to act as a smart client for Web Services and host intelligent XML-based documents.

Microsoft Access 2003: Access 2003 offers extended capabilities to import, export, and work with XML data files. Many of the new features provide a common error interface that makes it easier to find and correct XML issues.

Microsoft Office OneNote 2003: OneNote 2003 is a new application that is designed for note taking and management. Using OneNote, users are able to capture, organize, and reuse notes on a laptop or desktop. OneNote 2003 gives you one place to capture multiple forms of information, including typed and handwritten notes, hand-drawn diagrams, audio recordings, photos and pictures from the Web, and information from other programs.

Microsoft InfoPath 2003: InfoPath 2003 is a new application designed to streamline the process of gathering information teams and individuals. The structure of InfoPath allows these groups to work with a rich dynamic forms interface that allows for the collection and distribution of structured XML data. The native support of customer-defined XML, Web Services, SQL, or Access databases allows the collected information to integrate easily with a broad range of business processes and systems. This integration allows InfoPath to connect seamlessly and directly to organizational information and SOA.

What You Need to Know about InfoPath

For the average end user , InfoPath provides a general-purpose viewer of structured business data. Using this information, they can collect and distribute forms with no programming. This automatically guarantees data accuracy and adherence to business requirements.

For developers, InfoPath is the power tool for building applications that view, transform, and edit XML-based data. The native XML interface allows developers to easily develop and implement solutions that address organization process and workgroup collaboration scenarios.

The organization process of gathering information is typically inefficient and often leads to incorrect data with very little reusability. Paper-based forms are the best example of a hard-to-use collection mechanism that provides very little flexibility. Many times, custom applications developed for information gathering are expensive and difficult to maintain. The combination of these two factors often makes data and code reuse impossible with organizations of any size .

The solution to this is to create an SOA that solves the back-end integration issues but not the front-end collection measures. InfoPath becomes an important part of this approach. The end result is that InfoPath provides a reduced IT cost by allowing end users and developers to maintain form-based solutions, and XML provides the direct integration without additional overhead or development work.

Unlike the other Office 2003 applications, XSLT is the only option for data transformation. The structured XML data created by InfoPath is presented through a series of XSLT transforms and based on an object model that expresses documents using Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) through a series of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The InfoPath object model is actually derived from the Internet Explorer model, and this provides a direct link to SOA, WSDL, and HTTP, as shown in Figure 1.10.

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Figure 1.10: An overview of how InfoPath works.



Programming Microsoft Infopath. A Developers Guide
Programming Microsoft Infopath: A Developers Guide
ISBN: 1584504536
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 111
Authors: Thom Robbins

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