Professional Office Business Application Development: Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and VSTO

Office Business Application (OBA) development is new and growing at a rapid pace as large companies discover its importance. This book provides you with insight into how organizations can leverage OBA. You’ll go on an in-depth journey to learning how to use various tools to bridge the gap between business data and the people who need it. Plus, you’ll gain an extensive understanding on building and deploying OBA via a common scenario and that is broken down so that you can learn each component.

Professional Office Business Application Development Using Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server 2007 and VSTO

Office business application (OBA) development leverages the Office environment with SharePoint Server 2007 and Visual Studio® tools for Office (VSTO) to build solutions that integrate the most important details of design, deployment, and development to Office tools that are used every day. Understanding the key elements of building and deploying an OBA is integral to bridge the gap between business data and the people who need it.

After two helpful introductory chapters that review the concepts and design patterns behind OBAs, Steve Fox and Bill Sheldon dive into discussing the ways of creating specific parts of an OBA. Using a sample sales forecast OBA throughout the book, the authors escort you from the client-side development of the sales forecast OBA to the SharePoint, server-side extensions so that you can learn firsthand how to build an OBA from end to end.

What you will learn from this book

• How various technologies connect to one another as part of a whole composite application

• How to add business intelligence through Excel® Web Services and key performance indicators

• Ways to break down a scenario into various components so you can understand the specifics

• Tips for deploying and securing your OBA server components

Who this book is for
This book is for developers who are interested in using the Office system as a platform for building composite applications. Familiarity with the .NET Framework, object-oriented programming, the Office applications, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is helpful.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Steve Fox has worked in the IT industry for 13 years in a variety of technologies and positions, most recently in the area of Office and SharePoint development as a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. He has co-authored Programming Microsoft Office Business Applications (MSPress), Six Microsoft Office Business Applications for Office SharePoint Server (MSPress), and Microsoft .NET and SAP (MSPress), and authored a number of articles for a variety of technical publications. Steve is also active on the national and international conference circuit and spends much of his time presenting and teaching developers about Office development. When not working, Steve enjoys reading, writing, and playing sports. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Bill Sheldon is a software engineer and architect, originally from Baltimore, Maryland. Holding a degree in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Bill has been actively employed as a software engineer since resigning his commission with the United States Navy. He is a Microsoft MVP employed as a principal engineer with InterKnowlogy in Carlsbad, California. In addition to writing books, Bill also works as an instructor for Visual Basic and related courses at the University of California San Diego Extension and has published in excess of 100 articles. He is a contributing editor for SQL Server Magazine, and has had articles featured in several other Penton publications. Bill is an established MSDN online presenter and speaks at live events, such as VSLIve, DevConnections, Office Developers Conference, and community events, such as Code Camp and local user group meetings. Bill is an avid cyclist and wood worker, and is actively involved in the fight against diabetes.