Developing solutions for Office Live
I figured it's about time that I give an actual purpose behind my blogging here on MSDN. Seems like a smart thing to do, right?
As you can probably tell from some of my recent posts, I'm working on the Solution Developer Platform portion of Office Live's next release. We're migrating Office Live from v2 to v3 of Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) as our platform. WSS v3 is the foundation, and Office Live adds enhancements to and locks down on some WSS functionality.
WSS v3 has a lot of great new functionality in it (Blogs, Wiki, Workflow, Web Discussions to name just a few) and Office 2007 has a lot of rich integration with WSS v3, in particular as provided by Access 2007 (check out this video) and one fork of the product formerly known as FrontPage... SharePoint Designer. Office Live will attempt to harness all of that richness and make it accessible for our end users (small businesses) and reasonable for our Solution Developers.
Our expectation is, at least to start with, that Solutions on Office Live will be consistent with what you can do using WSS templates. SD's may want to enhance existing Office Live apps such as our Project Tracking or Human Resources to customize it for a specific customer or make it generic to a vertical industry. SD's may also want to create entirely new Sharepoint solutions with lists, alerts, workflows, etc. It's really up to them to imagine the possibilities.
Now, I've mentioned Solution Developers a couple times. Who exactly are these folks? We think they could be anyone from tinkerers to techie information workers to web developers. We do not think it includes hard-core C programmers (yet), although they certainly could develop solutions too. Basically, our SD's fall in a wide range, but we'd like the platform to be accessible to most of those levels of ability.
So, where does this blog come into play? My background is as a web developer. I've studied computer science, and have a 2 year degree in Software Engineering. But I don't consider myself to be a code jockey by any means. I don't know a whole lot about WSS, but I'm learning. I have some fundamentals around HTML, XML, scripting languages and working with applications (such as the Office apps). What I hope to do is track my trials and tribulations while learning to be a good Office Live Solution Developer so that you can learn from my mistakes, make suggestions for better ways to do things, and maybe even give it a try yourselves.
So there you have it. I guess that's my current charter. If you are interested, stick around!
