Updated: July 13, 2020 (March 21, 2005)

Office Bridge Platform Updated

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration services and client software. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s... more

A new version of the Information Bridge Framework (IBF), version 1.5, simplifies debugging and supports a wider range of client applications. The IBF is a development platform for solutions that enable Office client applications, such as Word or Outlook, to access data via Web services. IBF solutions can benefit employees who must occasionally view and update data from corporate applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, but don’t need all the capabilities of those applications. However, the IBF still lacks support for offline data access, a critical capability.

Important new features of IBF 1.5 include the following:

A debugger integrated with IBF’s principal authoring tool, the Metadata Designer, enabling developers to set breakpoints and trace IBF client calls to back-end Web services
A generic Smart Tag recognizer that developers can customize, which simplifies development and deployment of custom Smart Tags that access Web services through the IBF

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