On Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:19:39 +0100, Mark Harrison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jacqueline McNally" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 9:26 AM
Subject: [Marketing] integrating OOo with other "things"
Hello
Is there page other than http://development.openoffice.org/#GENERAL that
lists other organisations that have developed add-ons, plug-ins or
integrated OOo into their products ?
We're not ready to be listed on the page, but are moving that way. I
thought
I'd write up some detail by way of a "mini case sudy".
One of our Group Companies makes a specialist add-in for Excel that sells
for UKP several thousand. This was, until recently, written entirely in
VBA.
Last month, we completed the migration to two-tier - a core compiled DLL,
and a set of "wrapper" scripts to call the DLL functions from VBA. A
major
part of the motivation is to give cross-application comptability.
The next part of the process is to port the wrappers to OOo and/or
StarOffice. This is judged to be about 1000% easier than porting the
entire
code base across :-) The downside is that it won't give us O/S
portability -
only Spreadsheet portability on the Windows platform.
Maybe if you did it in something like Mono you wouldn't have such issues.
But yeah, great stuff.
The part of the code that may NOT be ported soon is the bit that creates
a
completely new menu in Excel to give access to over 100
market-sector-specific functions. This isn't something we've yet looked
at
within OOo - is there a tutorial on "creating menu items
programmatically?".
The other thing that we have Excel-specific code for is our own version
of
the "function wizard" which gets around some nasty limitations of the MS
function wizard.
Yes OOo has the also a lot of issues in this area.
Office 12 is actually likely to be a major crossroads for us as a
commercial
add-in developer. The existing codebase is cross-compatable with Excel
97,
2000 and XP. Office 12 makes life a lot more complex, because much of our
"added value" is around the aforementioned menu structure, and Office 12
is
doing odd things to the menu structure.
If truth be told, NONE of our clients has even raised OOo compatability
as
being on their roadmap. It's a tricky job juggling commercial resource
for
which there's no perceived demand coming from our marketing people.
It's, of
course, a chicken/egg issue. Obviously, the kind of clients who will
spend
thousands on an Excel add-in are not particularly fussed at the costs of
Excel itself, so we're not an obvious target market for OOo.
Yes mark, this is true, and probably is as hard as a market for
opensource. However I would see this as the first step toward providing a
much advanced control of integration. I mean, your company (or others)
have created this wizards without out the jewels of the MSO.. .it's source
code. And sometimes it has been a mixed between the development enviroment
that MS wants you and the custom code you integrate.
With OOo source code, your add-ins and macros could in theory gain a new
level of integration and will actually make it a value added proposal
based on the solution.
Regards,
Mark
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Alexandro Colorado
CoLeader of OpenOffice.org ES
http://es.openoffice.org
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