Developer Map for the 2007 Microsoft Office System: Download your poster today!

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the treasure map for Office developers that we were building and I am glad to announce that we finished two weeks ago the poster version and it's ready to download! This is the third poster of the 2007 Office System Document: Developer Posters download family.

The Developer Map for the 2007 Microsoft Office system helps developers visualize the different programs, servers, services and tools that will help them build solutions. You can drill down to each product and technology and learn about new features, objects, Web services, namespaces and schemas requiered to extend Office. There are more than 50 persons who worked to make this possible with the motivation of building a cool tool to evangelize Office. Based on the fact that Office 2007 is more than you think, we thought this was a great way to help developers understand the bigger picture and learn how Office products and technologies relate to each other.

The goals of this poster are:

1. Provide a roadmap that shows all Office products and technologies that have an interesting developer story.
2. Categorize all extensibility technologies (green bars) and visually demonstrate how you can use them to extend specific products. For example, you can use Ribbon UI extensibility for Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Outlook 2007 and Access 2007, but not for InfoPath 2007, Visio 2007, Project 2007, Groove 2007 or Communicator 2007.
3. List most relevant developer features (blue text) added to Office (2007) programs.
4. Make a clear distinction between all Office products and technologies (programs, servers, tools and services).
5. Make a clear distinction between features and services offered by WSS 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
6. Highlight the programs you can extend and customize using VSTO and VSTA (you will see a logo where VSTO or VSTA applies).
7. Explain the Add-in story by making a clear distinction between Shared Add-Ins, VSTO 2005 SE Application Level Add-Ins and COM Add-Ins.
8. Provide the names of specific namespaces, Web services, interfaces or schemas (gray text) required to extend functionality of different Office products and technologies.
9. Provide a list of most relevant objects (green text) used to extend Office programs, servers and WSS 3.0.
10. Finally, the most challenging goal, summarize the most relevant facts and make it all fit on a limited rectangular space.

BTW, if you have plans to attend Dev Connections in Las Vegas or Tech Ed Barcelona, you should visit the Office booths. We are sending nicely printed copies of this poster. I encourage you to get one (or more) b/c there's a lot of text and it looks better if you print it on a bigger piece of paper.

I can't describe how happy I am because of this poster. I enjoyed working with all the people who made this possible, but what makes me happier is that I know this will help other developers understand quickly what took me months to figure out. 

Cheers to Office and the whole galaxy of developer technologies it represents!