Hi, I work currently as software architect in a big unamed corporation (for those who want to make clever guesses, this is sent via a public webmail). The Office suite currently deployed is Office 2000. During its lifetime lots of clever VBA macros were written to access various corporate databases (and other similar resources) directly in Excel.
Needless to say the guys in charge of the overall infrastructure hate it (they like the idea of having small-scale short-lived developments implemented at the Excel level because it's so much less paperwork than doing it on a server, and besides users never define their needs properly so being able to tweak macros all the time helps. However tracking all those direct accesses and making sure they still work each time a database or another server conf is changed is a major PITA. And I'm not even writing about the security implications here...) So the big idea here right now would be to channel these accesses through a few well-defined web services. As a new member of the infrastructure group (in this corporate branch) I've been asked to write a tech note on how this could be done. Since Office 2000 level of support for web services is pretty low, some people want me to push for Office 2003 deployment corporation-wide (please note they are not in charge of the Office suite support, so they don't really care about what this would entail client-side. EAI compatibility weights a lot more here). I know the Office support group is currently studying several alternatives including Open Office (Office 2000 is approaching its EOL). I'd hate to be the one that made the choice go the Office 2003 way. Once a solution is chosen it won't change for another 5 years or so. I'd like to know if web services/soap support is planned in Open Office proper (not a fork) in the near future, so I can make a case for using it. Likewise, I'd like to know if we can realistically hope to reuse most of the current Office 2000 VBA macros. Please remember I'm only in charge of this aspect of the Office suite change (and only in this corporation branch), so that's the only points I can base my argument on. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
