VSTO Anchors Push for Office-Based Development

With Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft is finally signaling to developers that Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is the winner among many competing and overlapping technologies it has promoted for development of Office-based clients over the past six years. The latest version of VSTO improves support for Office 2007 and enhances developers’ ability to build Office-based front ends to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other mission-critical applications. However, IT managers will need to weigh the benefits of VSTO-based clients against the costs of deployment, software licenses, and development expenses they impose.

The Winning Platform for OBA Clients

VSTO is a development environment for Office Business Applications (OBAs)—applications that use parts of the Office System (which includes the Office suite as well as server products such as SharePoint Server) as the user interface for access to business data. For example, an Outlook add-in for an OBA might enable consultants to enter and review billable hours in an ERP system from their Outlook calendars.