Comments on: Microsoft's Office bucks for a promotion

Most corporate workers already spend their days using Office. The company's goal now is to get more servers to follow suit.

[tcmug]

Give us the tools

While I like the idea of MS Office becoming a development platform (I've been developing in Access and with the Outlook Object Model for years), I think MS has a way to go in giving us the tools to be sucessful.

Office is still using the JET database engine, and the version VBA included with office is still based on Visual Basic 6 (released in 1998). Moreover, documentation on items such as the outlook object model is limited and often very difficult to find.

So I say give us the "tools"! Integrate MSDE (SQL Server), and please, please update VBA to included VB.NET.

Just my two cents

Tim
Boston, MA

[Earl Benser]

I need the tools...

I need a clean, unencumbered word processor which can
generate the basic documents I need. I want a clean spreadsheet
which can track data for me. I need a basic data base to link
resources. I DON'T need some bloated ou,t on-steroids, Office
'system' no matter how 'nice' Bill claims it will be.

The KISS principle is still the way to go, Focus the application
designs on their core jobs. Then, as needed, develop supporting
applications to go into other activities.

Integration is the route of fools. That's like trying to come up
with one golf club good for any shot on the course.

The revision trap

A trap I've seen people fall into is developing applications in Access only to find out that the application requires a significant amount of recoding with each Access upgrade. This isn't worth the time and effort in my opinion. I've stuck to developing web based, platform independent apps only , as they seem to have a much longer life span with much less maintenance.