Corporate performance management is a very important component of how to measure overall strategy accomplishment. This session will cover Microsoft's PM vision and tools.

by Justin Whitney

Individually, Office Business Applications (OBA) and Unified Communications (UC) give developers robust new architectures in which to take collaborative apps to the next level. But together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Combining OBA with UC (or vice versa) enables integration of federated data and line-of-business apps with human workflows using communications including contextual collaboration (human to human communications), anywhere information access (human to machine communications) and business process communications (machine to human communications) across any modality including IM, voice, video (both 1:1 and conferencing).

Use the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Server SDK to create Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) server applications that customize and extend the functionality of Office Communications Server 2007, and to manage Office Communications Server 2007 deployments.

The Microsoft® Office Communicator Automation API contains a set of COM interfaces, objects, events, enumerated types, and other related programming entities. With Office Communicator Automation API, you can program a Communicator instance from a third-party application, as well as extend and customize user experiences with Communicator.

by Justin Whitney

2007 Microsoft® Office system introduces a new XML-based file format called Office Open XML as its default file type. An open, royalty-free standard, Open XML gives developers a wide range of new opportunities, primarily the ability to create and manipulate Office files without using Office. We'll answer the basic questions, and then dive into what Open XML looks like, how it works, and how you can code against it.

The Open XML object model encapsulates many common tasks that developers perform on Open XML packages, so you can perform complex operations with just a few lines of code. As you can imagine, this API is a great time saver for those of you that write code to manipulate Open XML packages using the System.IO.Packaging APIs.

Open document standards have become increasingly important for organizations across the globe. The Open XML Community is a group of businesses and governments spanning dozens of countries and five continents that support the use of the Ecma Office Open XML File Formats ("Open XML"). Open XML was designed to provide users the benefits of: faithfully representing in an open format existing office documents, interoperability, support across platforms and applications, integration with business data, internationalization, support for accessibility and assistive technologies, and long-term document preservation. This community supports Ecma International's decision to submit Open XML to the International Standards Organization (ISO/IEC) and believes this will bring additional choice and innovation to the marketplace.

OpenXMLDeveloper.org is your source for Open XML Formats news and information. It's all free and open to everyone. This site is updated regularly by a variety of contributors, so check back often.

Download this package to install open XML file format code snippets for use with Visual Studio 2005

Try out your choice of suites or programs from the 2007 Microsoft Office release for 60 days! Trial programs contain the same functionality that you get when you buy the perpetual versions-but only for a limited time.

by Justin Whitney

With the latest releases of the 2007 Microsoft® Office system, Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, and a host of other products, Microsoft has enabled a new type of application, known as Office Business Applications. But OBA is a big, somewhat abstract concept, with lots of pieces. As a developer, it helps to know exactly what to install and where to plug in your brain. This overview gives you a starting point for understanding OBA and figuring out where to go from here.

by Ty Anderson

Office 2007 features a new default XML file format that opens a new world of development scenarios to .NET developers. This article explains the developer benefits provided by the new Office Open XML File formats that will be released as part of the 2007 Microsoft Office System. After reading this article you will understand the architecture of the new file formats as well as understand how the new formats enhance Office development scenarios. In addition, the article discusses a sample application that illustrates how the new file formats enable Office document generation on the server.

by Alan Zeichick

Learn what Office 12 will mean for developers, particularly those who are creating commercial and enterprise apps.

by Ty Anderson

Learn how to consolidate task data residing in various Office file types into an Microsoft Outlook Add-in. This article shows how you can begin to incorporate snippets of data included in Microsoft Office files into a meaningful solution.

by Scot Hillier

Learn how to build an Outlook add-in that makes creating and distributing a status report as easy as clicking a button. In this article, Scott Hillier explains how to build a report with Outlook Tasks using SpreadsheetML and Visual Studio Tools for Office.

by Ty Anderson

Microsoft has opened up the file formats of Excel and Word through the Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas. These schemas free developers from using the Excel and Word Object Models of Excel to create documents on the fly and provide anyone with knowledge of XML a powerful method for building beautiful reports and delivering them to people inside the apps they already know and love. In this article, Ty shows how to retrieve data from a SharePoint list to build a nicely formatted report using Excel's XML Schema.

by Scot Hillier

Does your organization rely on Excel to create reports that are used by customer, clients, and managers? Creating these reports by hand is a lot of work, and often results in errors. Scot shows you how, using the XML Spreadsheet format and some managed code, these reports can easily be automated.

by Scot Hillier

Most organizations use a combination of Microsoft Office documents and e-mail to create informal document tracking processes that require manual updating. Scot Hillier shows you how to automate this process.

by Ty Anderson

Learn to build your own custom form for Outlook appointment items.