Microsoft Office 2007 Overview for Developers

Microsoft Office 2007 is the latest edition of a long line of productivity applications that have become commonplace on the desktops of information workers. Though the years, the Office brand has extended to new applications like InfoPath, Communicator, and Groove. It has also gained enterprise servers in SharePoint. Yet its core continues to be Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Information workers use these four applications to generate numerous files that hold organizational information. With each new edition of this software suite, Microsoft not only focuses on the spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and email, but enhances the ability for these items to participate in the enterprise. These enhancements include collaboration, enterprise search, and interaction with business data and line-of-business systems. The 2007 release steps up the support for extension by developers. In this chapter we will provide an overview of some of these enhancements and point out which solutions in the book incorporate them.