Chris Bortlik's Blog : OBA

Content Posted from the “Realizing SharePoint as a Development Platform” Event

cbortlik — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:02:58 GMT

Todd Mancini has posted the presentations from our “Realizing SharePoint as a Development Platform” event here on his blog. Please stop by Todd’s blog to check these slides out. If you’re going to be in Rochester, NY on December 9 please register and attend the event there.

SharePoint and Office 2010 Developer Training Courses on Channel 9

cbortlik — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:13:00 GMT

Yesterday, Channel 9 launched two new training courses for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 created by developers for developers. Channel 9 has always been about giving direct access to the engineers and future technologies from Microsoft, and now we’re extending this successful formula to bring you training that will allow developers to get started on learning about emerging technologies at their own pace. Today you’ll find extensive instructor recordings from top MVPs on how to develop against both SharePoint and Office 2010. We’ll also be publishing more content at the beginning of December that will include hands-on labs, source code, and much more! All of this free for you to consume or download at your own pace.

SharePoint 2010 Developer Training

See how SharePoint 2010 has evolved into a first-class developer platform. Also, learn how SharePoint 2010 provides the business collaboration platform for developers to rapidly build solutions using familiar tools such as Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 through this self-paced course.

Office 2010 Developer Training

Discover how Office 2010 Beta is a broadly extensible platform for building information worker productivity solutions and see how developing for Office with Visual Studio 2010 makes this easy. See online presentations with demos that will help you get started developing solutions from Add-ins to full featured Office Business Applications (OBAs) using Visual Studio 2010 with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 as the core platform.

We hope you enjoy this initial set of training videos and will check back with Channel 9 in the near future as we build the learning center out to support SharePoint and Office 2010 development.

SharePoint as a Development Platform

cbortlik — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:54:40 GMT

While preparing to present my 2 sessions at the “Maximize Your SharePoint Investment: Leverage It as a Development Platform!” events that we’re doing for Northeast enterprise customers in Waltham, MA (November 19) and Rochester, NY (December 9) I continue to be amazed at how rich and robust SharePoint is for configuring and developing custom solutions.

I’ve been involved in architecting and developing browser based applications for well over 10 years – both on Microsoft and other technologies. My technical evolution over the years has been consistent with what many others have experienced:

Static sites: HTML & JavaScript using tools like Notepad, FrontPage, DreamWeaver
Dynamic sites : C++, ISAPI extensions on IIS, Java
Wrapper applications: ASP
Frameworks: ASP.NET, AJAX
Platform: SharePoint

As with previous evolutions, using SharePoint as an application platform enables you to get out of the business of writing plumbing functions and focus on building applications that add unique value to your business. For example, why should you spend time writing workflows from scratch or building forms based solutions when SharePoint has out of the box capabilities and tools to automate most of that? Why should you write complex web controls, search, business intelligence and sites when SharePoint has so many out of the box site templates, features and web parts that you can configure and extend?

SharePoint provides a great layer of abstraction, services and functionality on top of ASP.NET This helps you accelerate your development cycles, lower project risk, reduce costs and get to market faster.

I’m very excited about many things that are coming in SharePoint 2010 to further improve the development experience on the SharePoint platform. In future blog posts I’ll dive into these areas deeper. However, if I’m pressed to outline my top 5 items in these areas they would be:

Development on a non server environment. In SharePoint 2010, you can now develop on 64-bit client machines that are running Windows 7 or Vista SP1 (or later).
SharePoint as a first class citizen in Visual Studio 2010. Great improvements here that any ASP.NET developer would love including, integrated debugging, visual designers, project/control templates, WSP deployment/packaging and tracing. There is also rich integrated Application Lifecycle Management through Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.
Silverlight web parts shipping out of the box to enable you to quickly add rich Silverlight capabilities to your SharePoint site.
Composite applications that include round tripping, packaging and distribution of tasks between business analysts, power users and developers. Significant improvements such as Visio 2010 for designing workflows; SharePoint Designer improvements (including exporting to reusable WSP packages); Access Services; InfoPath Forms Services; Word Services; Visio Services; PerformancePoint Services; and Excel Services.
Business Connectivity Services for creating reusable read/write data connections to external data sources (e.g. Active Directory, ERP, CRM, SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) that can be exposed and used across SharePoint and the Office clients, including off-line usage via SharePoint Workspace.

There is so much more that we’ll get into at the local events and in future blog posts. For now, I encourage you to check out some of the links and resources highlighted in my earlier SharePoint 2010 blog post.

Excel 2007 – Your Business Intelligence Client Solution

cbortlik — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:50:00 GMT

Many of my customers are evaluating business intelligence (BI) solutions. There are often many business drivers behind this trend including the need for analysis, reporting, planning and forecasting.

Prior to the release of Excel 2007 many customers would purchase a variety of different BI tools each with their own user interface, licensing costs and set of functionality. With Excel 2007 we have sought to bring BI to the masses while eliminating the need for a number of different tools and lowering the overall total cost of ownership for BI solutions.

Here is a summary of my top 10 favorite aspects of Excel 2007 for BI solutions:

Excel has become the rich BI client front end for PerformancePoint, SharePoint, SQL Server and any external data source or system. This allows users to easily aggregate, slice and dice many disparate data sources and get a consolidated view of their business.
By supporting 1 million rows and 16,000 columns of data in the same workbook, Excel 2007 allows you to work with more data. This addresses a critical business need expressed by many Excel users and overcomes previous product limitations of 64,000 rows which often resulted in the creation of multiple workbooks and extensive macros and programming to link the data together.
Excel Services enables you to easily publish an Excel workbook to SharePoint and then allow other users to access that data with just a web browser. This is of tremendous value when you want to make sure that everyone is looking at the latest version of data (aka a “single version of the truth”) and cases where you want to suppress hidden formulas, data and secure other sensitive data.
Conditional formatting adds powerful data visualization capabilities to Excel. You can easily add data bars, color scales, key performance indicators (KPI), and other icon sets to spot trends.
Pivot tables can now be created and used by anyone to organize and report on data. You do not need to be the “Excel guru” to be able to work with and change pivot tables. The redesigned pivot table capability and wizards streamlines the process.
The graphics engine for Office has been significantly improved with Office 2007. Charting and SmartArt produce professional looking graphics in very little time. These graphics can be shared and reused across Excel, PowerPoint and Word and eliminate the need for many 3rd party services and tools.
Tables in Excel automatically add common tools for working with related sets of data. For example, the filter and sort features have been improved and are automatically enabled now for Excel tables. You can apply multiple selections and even filter and sort by color (e.g. rows highlighted in green) and conditional format (e.g. by KPI).
Advanced built in formulas automate the creation of even the most complex calculations. Using Excel tables you can now even refer to cells based on user defined column and row names (e.g. Northeast, Southwest, etc.) rather than having to figure out the cryptic cell/column numbering (e.g. A1).
Data tools for identifying and removing duplicates, consolidating data and performing what-if analysis improves how you work with large sets of data and obtain meaningful insight from it.
Custom Office Business Application by partners and customers for building solutions on top of Excel. These could range from advanced Visual Studio .NET applications to basic macros. Since Excel uses the Open XML industry standard file format, Excel documents can be programmatically built and accessed from various tools.

Want to learn more? Check out the Microsoft Business Intelligence site and review customer case studies.

InfoPath – Going Green, Saving Money and Accelerating Development

cbortlik — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:52:00 GMT

Prior to joining Microsoft last year, I worked for more than 14 years as a Microsoft customer primarily in IT architect, development and technical management roles for large companies. Most of my recent work was related to building custom applications and forms on top of ASP.NET

One area that I did not explore much before joining Microsoft was InfoPath – especially what is currently available in InfoPath 2007.

With so many of my customers looking for ways to save money, go green and accelerate the development and deployment of new solutions, I figured it was a good time to write about my top 10 list of favorite InfoPath 2007 capabilities and solutions.

Many InfoPath developers are not developers at all! InfoPath is a great tool for business analysts and “power users” to create forms with little or no code. InfoPath also enables the creation of reusable templates and the segregation of development tasks between traditional developers and InfoPath designers. Check out this article for more details.
InfoPath can easily import existing Word or Excel documents into rich forms, which then enables the forms to be used as data input tools rather than just things that people print and then fill out.
You can quickly use optical character recognition (OCR) software to scan existing paper based documents into InfoPath to accelerate the move to electronic forms.
InfoPath forms can be built to target a rich InfoPath client and/or a web based InfoPath form running in SharePoint so users only need a browser to complete the form. The great news is that the design process is the same and InfoPath has a compatibility and design checker to automate the deployment and allow you to use the same form on a rich client or browser. There are a great set of InfoPath FAQ and roadmap articles to help you determine the right solution.
InfoPath forms can be used standalone or easily integrated into Outlook, Access or Groove. For example, a person can complete an InfoPath form in the body of an Outlook email message and never know that they are using InfoPath.
Using a tablet PC, InfoPath forms support inking technology to allow a user to write directly on an InfoPath form – another way of eliminating the need for paper forms.
InfoPath forms can be designed to support offline usage which is ideal for using InfoPath forms in scenarios where a network connection is not available.
Using XML technologies, InfoPath enables you to separate the data from the presentation device (e.g. PC, browser, phone) and to integrate InfoPath forms with back end systems and processes via web services, BizTalk and other techniques.
Need to do more with InfoPath than is available from the InfoPath forms designer? Good news. InfoPath forms can also be designed and extended using Visual Studio and managed .NET code.
Many customers and partners have used InfoPath to develop some advanced systems and processes that have helped them go green, save money, improve data quality and create more effective processes. Check out the case studies available to read more about what InfoPath can do!

Show me the proof!

cbortlik — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:49:01 GMT

When I meet with customers to discuss how they can use the Microsoft Office 2007 System to have a real impact on their business, I am frequently asked for proof and examples of other customers that are doing this in the real world.

Having spent 14 years as a Microsoft enterprise customer myself (working in various IT architect, development and technical management roles) I can certainly understand why our customers make this request.

If you find yourself asking for Microsoft to show you the proof, here are a few great sites and resources that you may want to check out:

Happy New Year!

New E2E Sales Forecast OBA Released

cbortlik — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:26:00 GMT

The E2E Sales Forecast OBA walks you through a salesperson creating and submitting a quarterly sales forecast. Using a customized Excel template (built using VS 2008/VSTO), our salesperson has the ability to navigate to the team Sales Forecast portal (SharePoint portal), invoke a custom Excel sales forecast template from the New button (content type mapping to a custom template), load line-of-business sales data into the document (via WPF custom actions pane), generate executive reports for the forecast (via Open XML), and submit the document for approval (through SharePoint workflow).

The approving manager can interact directly with SharePoint or choose to approve the workflow via a custom Outlook Form Region (built using VS 2008/VSTO). Messaging of the workflow is marshaled by SharePoint, and Open XML enables the solution to parse out the necessary data and attach to workflow and to the custom Outlook from region. Also, we’ve added UC so the actors within the demo can interact with one another.

Featured technologies include:

SharePoint
Office Client Ribbon and Action Pane Customizations (VS 2008/VSTO)
Outlook Custom Form Regions
Open XML
Unified Communications (UC)
SharePoint Workflow
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

For the community source-code download and accompanying Wrox book, you can check out the following resources:

E2E Sales Forecast OBA Resources

Sales Forecast Codeplex Source Code Site

http://www.codeplex.com/obasales

Sales Forecast Wrox Book Accompaniment

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470377313.html

OBA Developer Events in NH & CT

cbortlik — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:53:00 GMT

Jim O’Neil will be presenting at events this week during which he’ll be doing some presentations on Office Business Applications (OBAs) geared towards IT developers. Here’s a link to his blog with the details and information on how to register:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jimoneil/archive/2008/09/26/msdn-events-in-nashua-and-stamford.aspx

OBA Resources on MSDN

cbortlik — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:50:00 GMT

I just returned from the Microsoft Global Exchange (MGX) sessions in Atlanta and was blown away by all of the great things that Microsoft is doing. More news on that soon ...

I will be going to TechReady soon to get a deeper dive on some of the technologies, including Office Business Applications (OBAs). In preparation for this, I have been going through many of the resources available on MSDN.

Some to check out include:

1. Office Business Applications Developer Portal

2. OBA Sample Application Kits Page

Enjoy!

Analyst Reports - Office 2007

cbortlik — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:51:00 GMT

Since Office 2007 was launched, a number of analysts have written about Office 2007, customer plans and end user adoption. Here are links to a few studies and reports that you may want to check out:

2007 Survey: Office 2007 Off to a Fast Start with Users (Gartner, April 30, 2008) This research presents results from the annual Gartner office automation products North American and European surveys for 2007. The findings enable IT organizations to compare their Office product deployment plans with the plans of survey respondents.
Forrester Data Chart - Microsoft Office -The Current And Very Likely Future King Of Desktop Productivity (Forrester Research, April 2, 2008, ppt file, 359 kb) This PowerPoint deck presents data charts originally published in Forrester’s independent analyst report, “March 2008 North American and Western European Enterprise Microsoft Office 2007 Adoption Online Survey”. Based on a survey of 259 IT decision-makers at enterprises in North America and European enterprises, Forrester found that most enterprises (83%) believe Microsoft to be the innovation leader in desktop productivity.
Forrester Data Chart - The State Of Microsoft Office 2007 Desktop Adoption (Forrester Research, March 31, 2008, pptx file, 166 kb) This PowerPoint deck presents data charts originally published in Forrester’s independent analyst report, “March 2008 North American and Western European Enterprise Microsoft Office 2007 Adoption Online Survey”. Based on a survey of 259 IT decision-makers at enterprises in North America and European enterprises, Forrester found that more than 40% of enterprises have Office 2007 desktop applications in use and that most will deploy Office 2007 desktop applications within the next 12 months.
2008 Likely to See Broad Adoption of Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (IDC, January 2008, .pdf file, 168 kb) The report provides the results of a survey conducted by IDC in October 2007 to gauge adoption of Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007.
A Look at Improvements and Shortcoming in Microsoft Office 2007 Desktop Applications (Forrester Research, July 17, 2007, .pdf, 464 kb) This report, the second in Forrester’s “Innovation on the Desktop” series, states that “the breadth of Microsoft Office 2007 and its change of focus from desktop apps to a full system targeted at information workers warrants careful consideration by (Information and Knowledge Management Professionals.)” Analyst Kyle McNabb writes that “office productivity will evolve, taking advantage of more thin client and SaaS approaches, but we’ve not seen the end of the thick client.”
Developers, Get Ready: 2007 Microsoft Office Is A Serious Application Platform (Forrester Research, May 22, 2006, .pdf, 267K). “The prospect of business applications that employ Outlook, Excel, and/or Word as their user interfaces is very exciting to developers who want to focus on business processes, transaction processing, content management, and other back-office value rather than building user interfaces.”

Office Business Applications - Business Analyst Webcast

cbortlik — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:40:00 GMT

Jim O'Neil has reported on his blog that Steve Fox, a Microsoft Technical Evangelist specializing in Microsoft Office and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), will be hosting a Live Meeting session this Friday, June 20th, at 12 noon (ET).

This is an introductory level session targeted for folks new to Office Business Applications (OBAs) and looking to better understand the business value of building applications based on Microsoft Office.

To join the web cast, click on the link below:

Demystifying Office Business Applications for the Business Analyst

Office Business Applications (OBAs) and the Boston Celtics ...

cbortlik — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:08:00 GMT

I'm still recovering this morning from watching and celebrating the Boston Celtics winning their 17th NBA World Championship last night. It's hard to believe that just last year they were at the bottom of the league. Before the trades and work to assemble the new "Big 3" (Pierce, Garnett and Allen) people would not have even considered the Celtics to be a contender.

It kind of makes me think of Office Business Applications (OBAs). :-)

Up until recently it has been very challenging to develop, test and deploy OBAs for large companies. During my life prior to joining Microsoft (working for 14 years as a Microsoft customer in various application architect and development related roles) I did not really consider building applications in Office.

Now with the Office 2007 system, and our move towards using Visual Studio and .NET for Office development, we have a much more compelling technical and business case for OBAs.

What we're hearing from many of our customers is that typical business users spend most of their day in Office products such as Outlook, Word and Excel. Many companies are using OBAs to enable people to be more productive and work with external Line of Business (LOB) applications such as their CRM or ERP systems from right within Office. As you'd expect, there are also some great examples of OBAs and overall integration between Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS).

The OBA Central web site has some great information and resources on OBAs.

Check it out and let me know what you think ...