Chapter 10. Integrating the Business Data Catalog with Microsoft Office
This chapter covers
Office Business Applications (OBA) is a huge topic area that deserves a book in its own right. Steve Fox has done a good job of this already with his book, Programming Microsoft Office Business Applications. The website OBACentral.com is also well worth visiting, and includes videos of BDC solutions that you can watch online. But following an introduction to OBA in this chapter, we want to concentrate on where the Business Data Catalog can provide data from your LOB systems and make that data available in your Microsoft Office client applications. We’ll look at the development tools available throughout the Microsoft Office suite, and explore in detail the different project templates available to us with VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office), including the ability to create custom task panes, ribbons, and documents. We’ll then utilize the web service that we created in chapter 8, which will enable us to consume our business data in Office clients for each user whose device is remote from the SharePoint Web Front-End Server.