Extending Office to the Web

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The Office 365 launch in Bryant Park, New York.

Credit: Microsoft

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Office has always been a gateway drug for business app development. You could start with macros, move to VBA, and then build your own apps that connect to Access and to SharePoint. Then came Visual Studio Tools for Office, which added .NET support and allowed you to build apps that ran inside the Office tools – including inside Outlook. Anyone could build and share an Office app, allowing teams to customise tools and integrate productivity apps with line of business systems.

Now with the release of Office 2013, Microsoft is introducing a whole new application development model. Taking advantage of cloud services and widespread adoption of HTML 5 and JavaScript, the new Office Apps are designed to be built by anyone familiar with the web – while a mix of cloud-hosted and IDE tooling means that successful user apps can be taken into a controlled development and deployment environment.

A lot of what Microsoft is doing with development tooling in Office 2013 is familiar to anyone who’s built an app that uses web APIs – especially any Web 2.0-style mashups or a Salesforce Force.com Apex app. With more enterprise applications and cloud services offering RESTful JSON APIs, the tools and technologies that make up HTML 5 are suited to deliver user-interfaces and basic business logic, displaying external data in context of a document.

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Office Apps in the Office Store

 

Access is the application everyone thinks of when they think about Office development, with years' worth of legacy departmental Access apps still filling PC and server disks with data. It’s still got that role, though now data has moved out of its own database files to local SQL Server stores and to SQL Azure, and user interfaces are now web pages. There’s a lot to be said for taking the Azure approach – it reduces the load on departmental hardware, and increases the reach of your code, while still letting you use enterprise authentication tools to lock down access.

That web approach is the heart of the new Office extensibility model. A JavaScript API gives access to applications – with support for data, functions and events, and for working directly with content in documents. Apps themselves are best thought of web applications, only running in Office rather than a browser. They’re able to work in task panes or in content (or in the case of Outlook, in mail messages or calendar entries). Task pane apps are best thought of companions to document content, either delivering information from other applications, or using services to add extra detail to data in a document. Content apps go a step further and actually display their results in your document.

Once completed, Office apps can be deployed and shared through Office’s own app store. The Office Store lets you share or sell your apps, as long as you’ve developed a generic tool rather than something specific to your own business. An internal App Catalog powered by SharePoint does much the same for internal apps, whether you’re running it on premises or using Office 365. IT departments can monitor the apps running on their networks using built-in telemetry tooling and a new Office Telemetry Dashboard.