Which Office Solution Option Should I Use?

With all the new and different solution options available to you in Office, you might be wondering which option you should use to build your solutions. Each approach ”using Outlook forms, COM add-ins, smart documents, or even Visual Studio .NET tools for Office ”has different features and trade-offs. The key point is that you do not have to make a single choice. Many of the technologies work together. For example, you can build a solution that contains a COM add-in, smart tags, a smart document, and Outlook forms. The only issues you will run into are the different programming models, object libraries, and deployment mechanisms. Here are some suggestions for when to use each approach when building Office-based solutions:

• Outlook forms are the best choice when you are customizing built-in Outlook types and want to extend their functionality. For example, if you want to extend the contact form, you need to use Outlook forms. Outlook forms also provide off-line capabilities for your users.

• Use COM add-ins when you want to extend an Office application and you need a more powerful programming model than what Outlook forms provide. For example, if you are going to add new menus to Outlook or need to listen for Outlook application level events, a COM add-in is the technology you should use. COM add-ins can be written using native code in Visual Studio 6.0, or you can write managed add-ins with Visual Studio .NET. The only gotchas with COM add-ins involve deployment and updating.

• Smart tags are best if you want to provide context-sensitive actions in Office applications. These actions can be application independent in that they can work in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access. Smart tags are useful for tagging data that is meaningful to your users.

• Smart documents provide you with the power to customize the task pane to interact with XML-based documents in Word and Excel and to enhance your user 's experiences with these documents. Smart documents can work in conjunction with other Office solution technologies, and they can even provide an easier deployment mechanism for a COM add-in if the add-in is included in your smart document solution.

• InfoPath is the best solution if you want to have your users fill in structured business forms that will have XML-based output that you want to integrate into your business processes. InfoPath is a new addition to Office that allows you to design rich forms that represent XML data. It works with Web services and provides a rich forms environment.

• Visual Studio .NET Windows Forms is another option for Office-based solutions. While Windows Forms is not integrated into the Office environment, you can use it to automate Office applications through the Office object models. Windows Forms is a good choice if you already know how to develop using Windows Forms and Office integration is not a key requirement in your solution.

• The Visual Studio .NET tools for Office are a good solution for Word and Excel if you want to harness the power of managed code in your applications. Using these tools, you can write managed Visual Basic .NET or Visual C# .NET code instead of VBA. For Outlook, you can use the Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) for Office to build managed add-ins.

• Finally, what about Web applications? Because many of the Office object models are not meant to be run in unattended environments such as server-side ASP or ASP.NET applications, you cannot really leverage the object models for Office in these environments. You can leverage the Office Web components and the Outlook View control in Web-based environments when they run in client-side Web browser code. For Web-based solutions, you should leverage CDO rather than the Outlook object model. Web-based applications provide one of the easiest deployment mechanisms for your applications, but they do not provide the offline capabilities that some of the other approaches provide.