Relationship to Office 2000

[Previous] [Next]

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, the Office Web Components have no technological tie to Office 2000. Our team statically linked all the common code from Office into the Office Web Components so that there would be no technological dependency. This enables you to deploy the components in your custom solutions before your organization deploys Office 2000. We also specifically designed the components to coexist with Office 95 and 97 so that it is safe to deploy the components on a client machine running a previous version of Office.

Although OWC has no technological dependency on Office 2000, it does have a licensing dependency. The OWC library is licensed as part of Office 2000, so any client machine using the components at either design time or runtime must have an Office 2000 license. The client machine does not have to install any other part of Office 2000, but it does need a valid Office 2000 license (which is just a piece of paper). Corporations that purchase site licenses for Office 2000 can freely redistribute the OWC library within the corporation, which is by far the easiest approach for developing and deploying information systems using the components.

Because the OWC library is licensed as part of Office 2000, it is automatically installed when a client installs Office 2000. Deploying Office 2000 is actually the easiest way to deploy the OWC library to client desktops, but this is often an unrealistic option for large corporations with many client desktops. To facilitate the advance rollout of only the Office Web Components and MDAC 2.1, our team developed a separate installation and a special installer control known as the Web Installer.