Information Bridge Framework
Back in 2001, I hardly understand why is Microsoft releasing Smart Tag in top of Office XP. Still, I did a small research on it and found it's really a huge improvement in unlocking the potential of Microsoft Office, not just as a productivity tools - you can easily perform and link certain action for particular pattern that being recognized by the Tag. It also give the end user more opportunity in accessing information without leaving their favorite Word or Excel spreadsheet.
Apparently my XmartTagging Customer (XTC) won the phase I of Smart tag competition that time, the concept is very straightforward, XTC will recognized your customer name (the customer database included in installation package) - so that you will be able to perform several actions on top of it (e.g : Go To customer's site, Get the Customer phone, display customer address, list all customers, view customers by industrt (chart report) and my favourite : Perform Mail Merge function to your customer list... ).
Today, Microsoft have what it calls as "Information Bridge Framework". You can use IBF to access line-of-business data without leaving Microsoft Office applications. Usually, you can deploy the IBF in Task Pane or even integrate it with your Smart Tag applications. You can see the article about my test lab on IBF here, it's designed to consume existing XML Web Services that return Student Information. It's very simple though, but give me a knowledge on the process of enabling the 'kewl IBF in Microsoft Office.
Surabaya, 210905 - 23:47
