Office 2000 -> external web services

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Hi,

I've been tasked with doing a study of how to migrate our current
excel VBA macros (that currently dig in a very insecure and
uncontroled way in various corporate databases) to a setup were
everything is arbitrated by Weblogic web services (with EAI-provided
web services looming on the horizon)

The Office version currently deployed on clients Office 2000 on
Windows 2000 (+some NT4s).

It seems the Office Web Services toolkit is only available for Office
XP and 2003 and anyway depends on the SOAP Toolkit that is due to be
retired at the end of this month.

Will a .Net framework client deployment sufficient to have Excel 2000
talk to BEA web services ? Or must Office be upgraded to 2003 also
(since that is not such an easy thing to do this would give more
arguments to the people that want everything to be moved server-side
in the BEA java stack)

Regards,

 

[Dino Chiesa [Microsoft]]

Correct, SOAP Toolkit is going out of support, so the recommendation is to
not do new development on it.

Office 2003 supports running .NET
and there are some nice tools "Visual Studio Tools for Office" available.
But as you point out, that requires an upgrade.

Office 2000 supports COM. A simple way to connect a COM environment to .NET
is :

- built a .NET client library for the various webservices
- tlbexp the .NET client library, to expose it as COM objects
- call those COM objects from Office 2000

This would utilize the existing Office 2000, but would also require .NET on
each client machine. Within the client lib you can do smart client stuff,
like online/offline detection, caching, asynch communications. You could at
some point migrate to all-.NET and Office 2003, but that isn't required.

A similar alternative is to just use the MSXML2.XMLHTTP component to
get/post to HTTP locations to retrieve info. In this case the "wrapper" for
the webservice would be a webpage that would return XML, or anything you
want. The webpage could be weblogic, or ASPX, or ... anything. This is
less flexible than the COM-to-.NET approach, because it's not as easy to do
the smart-client stuff I mentioned.

so you've got options.

-D

 

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Office 2000 supports COM. A simple way to connect a COM environment to .NET
is :
[...]

Thanks for the overview - it helps me a lot

Regards,