As I was coming into work today, I was thinking about the kinds of solutions I have created or seen created with an Office aspect to them. I could think of only a handlful that did not have a server-side element to them. I look at the kinds of questions that come through my inbox either direclty, via RSS in the ng's or on our internal distribution lists, and there are some great things going on:

1) Server-side generation of Word documents using our WordProcessingML format

2)Connecting Excel to a broader range of data sources. IOW: the days of connecting to primarily to Access or SQL Server have been eclipsed. Now, we want to connect directly to Web sources, Web services, and a very wide variety of data sources.

3) Connecting Office to SharePoint-based data. There are aspects of this baked into Office 2003, but you can customize and go much, much farther.

In the end, I am pleased to see how adaptable Office is. I will admit that not all of my Office-related development has been easy. I learned the hard way how very different the startup routines are for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I thought they would all go about things the same way....I was wrong. But, I have always found a workaround, and overall, the experience has been good.

 Rock Thought for the day: One of the readers of my blog did something very generous. She sent me a CD with the "lost" Paris tapes that Jim Morrison did two weeks before he died. I will be sending her a thank you gift. The CD is truly great. As a former sound man for a band, I love this kind of raw recording material. Now, I need to get my hands on more JM bootleg rarities! It's addictive.

Rock on.