Smart Documents | First Look Microsoft Office 2003

At first glance, the concept of smart documents seems pretty simple. A smart document would anticipate what you're creating, know what you need, and offer the resources to help you create it. It might offer you certain equations for particular financial procedures or suggest a disclaimer paragraph for the end of the proposal you're writing. A smart document would save recognized data in familiar ways, keep track of your personal user settings, and be able to provide additional data or prompts when you need them.

Smart Documents: Quick Facts

Here are some quick facts about smart documents and the way they're distinguished from smart tags and InfoPath:

Smart documents work with Word and Excel.
Developers create smart documents solutions for end users.
Smart documents display customized helps (prompts, links, actions, and more) in a Document Actions task pane.
Smart documents are context-sensitive and interactive in the sense that they respond to users' actions in a document.
Smart documents use XML schemas to provide the structure of the created document.
Deployment of smart documents is simple; Word or Excel templates can be placed on a server or even sent as an attachment to an e-mail message.

The idea behind smart documents is exactly that: documents that enable you-as an IT manager, developer, or expert end user-to build business-specific information into the Word or Excel documents your end users work with. Smart documents might help users in the following ways:

Providing help with formatting. For documents with specific formatting instructions (for example, a style sheet used by an online magazine to enable writers to HTML-code their writing), a smart document can provide formatting hints and helps as well as lend tagging capability and access to a tag library. Writers could simply click a tag to insert it or search for help to determine which tags to use by clicking a link that takes them to an HTML reference.
Prompting users to add information. Some documents and spreadsheets include boilerplate text or common features that a smart document can add automatically. For example, suppose that a legal disclaimer is added at the bottom of every product description of a new prescription drug offered by a pharmaceutical company. A smart document can prompt the user to add the boilerplate text and give him or her the option of adding a disclaimer that has been written in different ways for different audiences.

Automating a process. Smart documents can actually 'know' when they are complete and route themselves to the next person in the approval process of a business proposal. When the next person reviews the document, he or she can click programmed Accept or Reject buttons to send the document along to be printed and then added to a document library, perhaps on a Microsoft SharePoint Team Services site.

Note

These are just a few ideas for possible application of smart documents. Because this technology offers a wide open opportunity for developers, it will be interesting to see how their creative minds make the most of these powerful and flexible features to help end users working in the familiar Word and Excel interfaces.

Smart Document Possibilities

Smart documents provide a great opportunity for developers to create custom smart document applications for businesses. In a doctor's office, for example, smart documents might enable office personnel to do the following:

Create a referral letter to a particular specialist using boilerplate information suggested by the smart document
Automatically route reports to various doctors in the practice
Track, store, and update information related to consultations
Easily look up information on treatment plans, prescriptions, health insurance, and more
Provide prompts related to a specific patient, such as the date of the last visit, the attending doctor, and so on

In a car dealership, smart documents could take care of these tasks:

Control vehicle customization worksheets that track costs of specific custom items and apply them to pricing per unit
Provide customer service workers with links to information about a specific customer's car and service record
Insert boilerplate legal information for lease and purchase contracts
Allow workers to create, save, fax, or e-mail customer-satisfaction surveys
Generate a chart based on car sales for a specific time period and inserting the chart in a Word report

In a Web design firm, smart documents could provide these services:

Format conventions and templates for project proposals for different types of clients
Create status reports with prompts and approvals for the various stages of the Web design project
Link to the picture library associated with an individual project
Prompt for text describing specific Web-design tasks (for inclusion as boilerplate text in client proposals)
Automatically post of critical documents to a SharePoint Team Services site so that remote members can check project status and download important files

Smart Documents for End Users

What will an information worker see when he or she works with a smart document? In some cases, the experience might be completely transparent. With the familiarity of Word and Excel task panes, users are now accustomed to looking for help with tasks and procedures by going to the panel along the right side of the work window. Because a smart document provides a customized, document-specific task pane, users might not actually realize they are working with smart-document technology.

The smart document is aware of the cursor position and can display information in the task pane related to the worker's specific task or action. The information might take any number of forms, including these:

Displaying a listing of product names and numbers when the user enters information in a specific field
Providing links to information related to the user's current task
Prompting the user with the next step in a process
Giving suggestions for content or actions

A user might receive the smart document via e-mail or by downloading it from the Web. When he or she opens the file, Office 2003 does the necessary security checks to ensure that the document was sent by a trusted provider. If the security measures check out and the user approves the installation, the template is installed on the user's local machine, along with the supporting files needed to provide the smart document content.

Smart Documents for Developers

The smart document itself is a combination of more than one technology. Developers can use XML schemas to set up the structure of a Word or Excel document and create a custom DLL using Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, Visual Basic .Net, C++, and C#. The smart documents allow developers to use XML structures to connect their documents to databases and build actions and logic into a document information workers use every day. This makes data more accessible across organizations; provides significant, relevant help for end users; reduces duplication of effort; and lessens the error margin in data entry and manipulation. Moreover, because smart documents can update automatically from trusted servers, developers can work at the server level instead of deploying to individual user systems.

Tip

A dynamic-link library (DLL) is a file (with a .dll extension, naturally) that contains a library of common functions used by applications. This library is dynamically linked to the application.