Charles Maxson, director and technical evangelist for Plural, Inc., says his firm is having great success using smart tags. We re excited to work with Microsoft to deliver integrated solutions that address these specific customer needs. Another time saving attribute of Office XP Developer is the product's support for Digital Dashboard capabilities. A digital dashboard is a customizable portal framework that enables knowledge workers to view and collaborate on personal, team, corporate and external information. Digital dashboards, which are based on the Outlook 2002 messaging and collaboration client and Office XP, allow workers to take advantage of the analysis tools, collaboration capabilities and support for Internet and messaging standards that are built into the product.
Dashboards allow developers to quickly assemble corporate information in one location.
Digital Dashboards are built on Web Parts, reusable components that can contain any kind of Web-based information. Developers can quickly build Web Parts from HTML and other Web-based controls, and deploy them using the existing digital dashboard infrastructure. The template for the Office XP Developer Digital Dashboard project includes tools for building Web Parts or complete Digital Dashboards that run against Exchange 2000 Server or the new Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. The Dashboard Template and Web Part Designer can be used as standalone applications or opened as a project in the Microsoft development environment. In either case, Gurry says, developers can benefit from the features of this environment.