Shown here are some prominent platforms and development environments for Office-based clients that access corporate application data, along with Directions’ best guess on the future prospects for applications built on each platform. In the opinion of Directions, platforms that have broad support throughout Microsoft and that support client applications that are independent of Office’s current COM APIs (which will get limited future investment from Microsoft) will offer the longest life for applications.

However, not all Office client platforms have the same capabilities. For example, the Office Research task pane supports only retrieving data, and only from Web services that have a specific API. Clients created with InfoPath, the Information Bridge Framework (IBF), Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and VSTO can retrieve and update data from a broader range of sources. Platforms also differ on which client products they require-for example, only VBA works on versions of Office prior to Office 2003.

Shown here are some prominent platforms and development environments for Office-based clients that access corporate application data, along with Directions’ best guess on the future prospects for applications built on each platform. In the opinion of Directions, platforms that have broad support throughout Microsoft and that support client applications that are independent of Office’s current COM APIs (which will get limited future investment from Microsoft) will offer the longest life for applications.

However, not all Office client platforms have the same capabilities. For example, the Office Research task pane supports only retrieving data, and only from Web services that have a specific API. Clients created with InfoPath, the Information Bridge Framework (IBF), Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) can retrieve and update data from a broader range of sources. Platforms also differ on which client products they require-for example, only VBA works on versions of Office prior to Office 2003.