As an IT pro, you might have already felt the rumble of Excel Services within your IT circles. Or your clients might have gotten wind of something big on the horizon. Either way, the momentum is building, churning, and evolving in a way that will cause significant shifts in the technology that powers Microsoft Office applications. And you need to be prepared to handle that change because it promises to reshape the very way customers and businesses interact with these types of applications in the enterprise.
Excel Services is a new technology built and conditioned to support and extend spreadsheet-based applications. One of the defining points of this new technology is that it is designed to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. In addition, the programmable parts of Excel Services are hooked into the .NET Framework so that user-interface pieces can be created to either sit on the client desktop or roam the Web through the browser.
Programming Excel Services describes the Excel Services product that is part of MOSS 2007 in complete detail. The material covers Excel Services using techniques and approaches common to .NET technology. This is no accident; MOSS 2007 is built on .NET technology. Where appropriate, and as necessary, the written discussion is complemented by code snippets written in Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and C#.
Programming Excel Services provides a fresh perspective on software as a solution. In that regard, it is substantially different from most resources that cover the subject. The book, as a whole, is designed to encourage you to think outside the box. It departs from the run-of-the-mill resource recipes for learning a new product. For instance, this resource shows you how to use Excel Services to overcome fundamental flaws in business processes today. Consider a user who changes a spreadsheet and forwards it to each member of her team for review. This type of approach is fundamentally flawed because it leads to out-of-sync spreadsheets that grow difficult to manage. The cure for this ailment is software as a solution—that is, the ability to use software to encourage the adoption of a better process, such as peer collaboration on a single, versioned copy of the spreadsheet. And this is where Programming Excel Services delivers, because it encourages the developer to solve the problem rather than just remedy a symptom.
