Why Were the Office Web Components Created?

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The technologies developed for the World Wide Web are taking both large and small businesses by storm. Companies now see the Internet and the Web as key mechanisms for reaching their customers and for distributing information among customers, suppliers, and vendors. Companies are also realizing that the same technologies used internally on their LANs or WANs (known as intranets) provide scalable, flexible, easy-to-use mechanisms for sharing information and for developing and deploying tools to run their businesses.

Not so long ago, setting up and managing content on an intranet was a black art relegated to "webmasters." With the advent of site management and content creation tools such as Microsoft FrontPage, ordinary mortals could create web-ready documents and manage them much like they managed files on their local computers. Tools such as these made it possible for semitechnical individuals to set up web sites and share information with their coworkers.

Documents full of text lend themselves well to HTML and web browser technologies, but not all documents are useful when viewed as static text only. Authors who create spreadsheets, databases, and database reports encounter special problems and opportunities when sharing these on their corporate intranets. Much of the value of sharing a spreadsheet or database report lies in letting other users interact with it and tailor the model to their own needs. For example, if you create a spreadsheet to analyze a product's profitability given various input costs, an important aspect of sharing that spreadsheet is enabling other users to change or enter new assumptions and view the recalculated results. Likewise, if you create a Microsoft Excel PivotTable report (more commonly known as a crosstab report), allowing other people to sort, filter, group, reorganize, or drill down to more detail is an essential part of sharing these documents. In other words, publishing a spreadsheet or database document on a web is only half the story. The other half is enabling others to interact with the published document and garner information that's meaningful to them, not just to the publisher.

Corporate information technology (IT) groups are also realizing the benefits of web and Internet technologies. Many information systems are much easier to develop, deploy, use, and support when created with web technologies on the corporation's intranet. Two such classes of systems exist: decision support systems (DSS), also known as executive information systems (EIS) or the more recent name online analytical processing (OLAP), and transactional systems, which are used infrequently or by large audiences. The Sales Analysis and Reporting solution in Chapter 7 gives an example of OLAP in a web browser, and the Timesheet solution described in Chapter 8 shows an example of a transactional tool commonly used by a large audience.

Decision support systems lend themselves incredibly well to the technologies and user metaphors of the web. Want to know how many units of your product were sold last month? Open your web browser, and click a particular hyperlink. Need to see a list of customers in your district? Again, it's just a click away from your team's intranet home page. Technologies such as Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) have made it possible for IT groups to deliver live reports on demand in a format that can be viewed, printed, or imported into a variety of analysis tools.

However, often the person viewing the report wants to see it in a slightly different way, sort it by a different value, group the data in a different order, drill down and see more detail about a number, or see the data organized into a chart. When any of these scenarios occurs, IT groups return to the same problem they have always had to deal with: how do they build a flexible, robust, and easy-to-use reporting system that satisfies everyone's needs?

The second class of systems—transactional systems—also benefits from the technologies of the web. Need to change your 401(k) contribution? Just follow a hyperlink on the human resources home page, enter the new value, and click the Submit button. Need help fixing your computer? Navigate to the helpdesk site, fill out the form describing your problem, and click Submit. There's no install program to run, no complex application to execute, and little to no client-side disk space needed.

Sometimes these applications demand a richer client interface, one that will provide gridlike data entry, recalculation, updates to charts showing the impact of the current value, and so on. To keep the deployment benefits, an IT group would need to use an active component in the page; however, they often lack the resources to develop such components themselves.

The Subtler Side of Buzzwords

To be precise, the terms "decision support systems," "executive information systems," and "OLAP" are not quite synonymous—each has a slant that makes it a little unique. The term "executive information systems" is hardly used today since information systems aren't used only by executives anymore; however, once upon a time the phrase described information systems that delivered critical, high-level business information to executives who were monitoring the health of the company. The term "decision support systems" is more encompassing and applies to systems that aid in decision making, often focusing on delivering ad hoc data analysis. "OLAP" is a hot buzzword today, and it's more often used to describe a class of technologies than the solutions built around them. Alas, our friends in the trade press often use all these terms interchangeably.

So how do you deliver an interactive experience on the corporate intranet? How do you make a spreadsheet or database report come to life in the web browser? How can you develop and deploy solutions that provide rich data analysis and data visualization capabilities? How can you build transactional solutions with richer client interfaces? The answer is the Office Web Components.



Programming Microsoft Office 2000 Web Components
Programming Microsoft Office 2000 Web Components (Microsoft Progamming Series)
ISBN: 073560794X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1999
Pages: 111
Authors: Dave Stearns

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