In Microsoft Office, the Microsoft Office Server Extensions (OSE) library enables you to control objects in Discussions and DiscussionServers collections programmatically. You can add new discussions and discussion servers, or you can read, modify, or delete existing discussions and discussion servers.
Important: To enable the OSE library in your programming environment, you must first set a reference to the Microsoft Office Server Extensions 1.0 Object Library.
The Global object is your starting point for exploring discussions and discussion servers. The Global object represents an instance of OSE. The Global object enables you to add subscriptions to discussion servers, get the name of the current Microsoft Office user, and return the collection of discussion servers or discussions on the OSE host.
The DiscussionServers collection object contains one or more DiscussionServer objects. Each DiscussionServer object represents a discussion server registered on the computer you’re currently using. A DiscussionServer object is composed of a friendly name and a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that provide connection information about the discussion server to users. Use the DiscussionServers method of the Global object to return the DiscussionServers collection that’s registered on the computer you’re using.
You can open the Discussions collection for a particular URL by using the OpenDiscussions method of the Global object to return the Discussions collection for the document specified by the URL. This Discussions collection can contain many levels of discussions; these levels are organized in a hierarchy. Each Discussion object in top-level Discussions collection is a comment about the topic document. Each Discussion object can contain child Discussion objects, which are replies to the original Discussion object. Replies to replies are at the next level in the discussion hierarchy, and so on. You can traverse the discussions hierarchy by using the Discussions property of the Discussion object.