SharePoint 2007, .NET, SQL and Force.com Development

Office 2007 Demo

Microsoft just released a demo of Office 2007 on their website. Click here.

New Features and Functionality of SharePoint 2007

I couldn't help but stop and document some of the high level features and functionalities of SharePoint 2007. Now, the one thing to note is that Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Server (formerly known as SharePoint Portal Server) will continue to be marketed the same, except that SharePoint Server will also contain rich Business Intelligence features. Below is what I have found for both the development and extensibility of SharePoint 2007.

SharePoint 2007

I went to a number of SharePoint sessions at the conference and have seen the added capabilities that incorporates the use of the new Windows Workflow Foundation API, AJAX.NET (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML for .NET), RSS, and Business Intelligence products.

Bill Gates outlined that Microsoft will take significant steps to make SharePoint the presentation tool for Business Intelligence. The commitment to this was introduced by implementing Key Performance Indicators (which is the core to scorecarding) in SharePoint and by creating a new Report Center template.  This template contains KPI, Excel Services (running MS Excel on the server), and OLAP filtering web parts. This can also be easily modified to contain Reporting Services web parts for more detailed analytical reports.

Right now, from what I can tell, more corporations that implement Office 2007 will be able to take advantage of these capabilities. However, they will still need consulting services to implement most of these new capabilities.

BI and Pivot Table Manipulation in Excel 2007

When I viewed the new sets of functionalities of Excel 2007 at the Microsoft Office Developers Conference, I thought it was worth blogging about. But I wanted to keep it focused around the features related to Business Intelligence and Pivot Table manipulation. Below is what I gathered.

Excel 2007...

• allows one to connect to a shared data connections source within a SharePoint document library in order for a business analyst to create new pivot tables against. The benefit here is having only one database source connection that is managed by IT and distributed throughout the organization. The shared data connection can go against the corporate Data Mart, OLTP database, OLAP database, or any other data source
• allows one to view the pivot table field list with a number of checkboxes associated with the fields that can be placed on pivot table row, column, page, or filter area. In addition, the field list adds easier field level adding capabilities

Microsoft Office 2007 "Ribbon" interface

I figured I should change the direction of my blog from talks about the new Open Office XML File Formats to the user interface of Microsoft Office 2007 (a.k.a., "Microsoft Office 12"). In this new version of office, the user interface had a styleful change. If you have ever used Apple computers, you would have noticed how much time they have spent making it less boring than the PC computers. I think Microsoft realized how Microsoft Office was also...well let's just say...a bit boring. Now, Microsoft Office has something called "Ribbons" that contain Command Tabs, Contextual Command Tabs, and Galleries. These controls provide a tabbed view to the traditional main menu bar and vertical sub menus. Many of the sub menus of the main menu bar were hidden from users that had no reason to use them, now they have no choice but to investigate and learn how to use these cool "new" functionalities of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Below are snapshots of MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

Product	Link
Word 2007	Sample
Excel 2007	Sample 1 Sample 2 Sample 3 Sample 4 Sample 5
PowerPoint 2007	Sample

Manipulating Open Office XML File Formats

I had the opportunity to talk to Kevin Boske, Program Manager of Office Programmability at Microsoft Corporation yesterday about what is the best way to manipulate the new open xml document file types. He stated that in the .NET Framework, the best way to do so, is by accessing the System.IO.Packaging namespace. This namespace is part of the new WinFX. The packaging namespace allows one to access content types within the open xml file type. The content types are known as "part names". So when one wants to access a part like document.xml or sheet1.xml within the open xml file type (e.g.,"docx" or "xlsx") they would need to use the below code snippet.

using (Package p = Package.Open(packagePath, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.ReadWrite)
{
    /** Currently packages cannot overlay an existing part.
      * So to swap it, it must first be deleted and recreated.
      **/

Uri uriPartTarget = new Uri("/Word/Styles.xml", UriKind.Relative);

  p.DeletePart(uriPartTarget);

PackagePart packagePartReplacement =
  p.CreatePart(uriPartTarget, "application/vnd.ms-word.styles+xml");

   using(FileStream fs = new FileStream(stylePath, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.ReadWrite)
   {
     copyStream(fs,packagePartReplacement.GetStream());
   }
}

New Office XML File Formats...Part 2

Okay, so in Part 1, I talked about the new file types [doc|xls|ppt] + "x". Now, in Part 2, I will delve a little deeper. These file types are really zip files under the hood. So, when you add the "zip" extension to the file name you are able to view its contents which are fully enumerated components of the type. Therefore, a file named "MyDocumentMaster.doc" would now be "MyDocumentMaster.docx" and the contents of that file can be accessible by changing or adding the extension “zip” to have "MyDocumentMaster.docx.zip" or "MyDocumentMaster.zip". When this is exploded, the contents looks like the below.

New Office XML File Formats...Part 1

Most Office System developers heard of the following markup languages {WordProcessingML, SpreadsheetML, and PresentationML}. Some of you have even worked with it. Out of those who worked with it, I am sure a number of you thought, this should be easier to use than it is. I agree with you and so did the developers and program directors of Office System 2007. However, they were working on integrating XML throughout the application...so this was on the back burner until they had something working that addressed this.

Now they have...

Office 2007: Sharepoint and Excel

I was just skimming through the Microsoft "Sharepoint Team Blog" and noticed a post that is worth adding. That is the new ways Office 2007 will rock the IT departments world. More simply, Sharepoint and Excel will have better integration than Sharepoint and Office Web Component Web Parts. Below is an excerpt.

The Excel team has created an engine that supports databinding, calculation and rendering of Excel workbooks on top of SharePoint. All HTML. No ActiveX. You see the data on the SharePoint page and (if you have permission) open it in the Excel client for your own analysis. This gives users a very flexible canvas using Excel's modelling, formatting and charting capabilities and more natural way to discover and analyze data. For more information, check out the Excel team's blog (I've linked to their server posts - start at the bottom as they cover a lot).

We are building on this to enable people to create more flexible BI portals rapidly with new SharePoint BI tools such as the "Report Center" and "Dashboards". The Report Center is a special SharePoint document library for browsing Excel, SQL Reporting Services, Dashboards and other reports. Dashboards are easy to construct web part pages with out-of-box "shared slicing" (e.g. filter by product line) of Excel workbooks, SQL Reporting Services reports, Key Performance Indicators (e.g. red stoplights if sales are under-budget) and views on Business Data entities (e.g. customers from SAP). We'll cover these in future articles. Besides the Excel blog, it is worth checking out our BI strategy announcements and the SQL Server 2005 BI Page.

I'd add that when we show people previews of these, they often ask with a little confusion "So is SharePoint for content management OR business intelligence?" The answer is "Yes". Just as we brought together tools for documents and spreadsheets together in Office with Word and Excel because users need an integrated set of tools for many tasks like preparing business plans, we are bringing a variety of server capabilities from workflow to BI to search together on top of Windows SharePoint Services to enable more flexible and cost-effective information management solutions.

Ref: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/01/16/513505.aspx