SharePoint® 2007 and Office Development Expert Solutions

Chapter 4. XML, Web Services, and Extensibility in Office 2007

Modern information workers need the ability to work across systems seamlessly with tools that are familiar in order to make them more productive. Using Office as a front end to custom and line-of-business applications enables users to work with tools they already know, and it gives users the ability to customize and reuse information to suit their needs.

Office is also the client for most document management activities that take place in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Since the time of the first version of SharePoint, Office has been extended to seamlessly support working with online repositories; and with the Office 2007 release, the Office client applications even expose workflow capabilities to provide a seamless experience.

In this chapter, we'll look at how Office 2007 can be used as part of a custom solution:

• First we'll look at Content Controls and Custom XML Parts, new features of Word 2007 that make it easier to separate document design from data.

• Then we'll look at the new OpenXML file formats, first by examining their structure and then by generating a Word document in an ASP.NET application and populating it from data in a SQL Server database.

Most of the examples in this chapter focus on Word and Excel because they are the most popular applications in the Office suite. In addition, they are the most common targets for developers building custom solutions. We will ...