| Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide | |
What's the first important step in building a solution based on Microsoft® Office 2000? As with anything else, planning and design are the keys to successful solution development. Spending a little time on solution design before you begin writing code can make your job more fun. And in the long run, your customers will be happier with the results.
The first chapter in this book, "Understanding Office Solution Development," is just an appetizer. It introduces some of the cool new features you'll find in the Office 2000 suite of applications, such as the new Component Object Model (COM) add-in architecture, the Web-publishing tools that make it easier to create rich, interactive documents that can be shared over the Internet or an intranet, the enhanced security features for protecting your solutions, and the advent of universal data access with ActiveX Data Objects (ADO). This chapter also discusses some of the benefits of building an Office-based solution, such as faster development time and lower support and training costs.
The second chapter, "Designing and Deploying Office Solutions," offers suggestions for the development process. It begins at the beginning, with tips on identifying the customer's needs and modeling the customer's business process before you start coding. This chapter outlines considerations for designing common types of solutions, such as which applications to use, where to store data, how to analyze and present data, how to design an effective user interface, how to design code for reusability, and what kinds of measures you may need to take in order to secure your solution. It also suggests ways to deploy different types of Office-based solutions.
Before you dive into the rest of this book, take some time to look over these first two chapters, so that ideas about planning and design are in the back of your mind as you move forward. Then you can get on to the real fun — designing and building an Office solution that takes full advantage of the exciting technologies at your fingertips.