The February Issue of MSDN Magazine is out and an article the I wrote about writing Managed Smart Tags for Office applications is in that issue.  When I began to write the article, I asked a bunch of developers if they had ever written a Smart Tag (managed or unmanaged).  It was 1 out of about 10 actually had written one.  The great thing about Smart Tags is that every company big or small that uses Office can use them in some way.  This can range from a simple link to shipping information based on a unique code or something more complex like aggregating sales information and presenting it in the Research Pane.  I hope the article allows some developers to revisit Smart Tags and do some great thing with them.

If you are willing to share some ideas that you have or have implemented, I think many people would like to hear it.

Here is a link to the article: Realize the Potential of Office 2003 by Creating Smart Tags in Managed Code.  Also, John Durant wrote a great article on Custom Research Services in the same issue that shows how to write a service for the Research Pane.