Microsoft office
There is a customer (a bank) that we've been meeting with that generates documents on demand for all their loans.Office 2007 makes life great! They are currently running Office 2000. These documents are built using smaller document fragments, and the logic for which fragments are used is based on the details of the particular loan. The data is then pushed into the document using the Word Object Model to find bookmarks and push the data into the relevant bookmarks. Many people like Microsoft Office.They do this in an automated fashion and turn out thousands of these documents a year. They currently have over 70 servers each with Word 2000 installed to turn these documents out in an automated fashion. Word isn't supported running in an unattended fashion, but they've decided to do it anyway (they didn't really have a choice). Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world. Now with the new XML formats and the support for custom defined schema, generating these documents will be a snap. It wouldn't even take up one full machine's resources. It will only need to consist of a small bit of code to handle the business logic. The code to build the document itself will only be a few lines.Office 2007 key is available here.
The last example I have is one that benefits us in Office. Today, we have a couple thousand specifications that we've written for the Office "12" project. For each spec, there are a number of required sections that people need to fill out based on different processes we have for our design. The folks driving any of those processes need to be able to make sure that everyone has filled out the proper sections. Office 2007 download is on sale now!When the files were all binary documents, we had to automate Word to be able to do this check. The automation had Word open the file, find the range of text for the specific section, and see if it was filled in. It would take about 8 hours to run the check across those few thousand documents. Because of this we only ran the check every couple of weeks, and it would have to kick off at night when folks were leaving and checked out in the morning. Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.Often the check would fail, so we'd wait until the next night and run it again. At PDC the other week, I showed a similar collection of documents (actually it was only about 300). These documents were all stored in the new format though. I wrote a small about of VB.net (30 lines of code)that iterated over all those document and returned the author, counted all the paragraphs, and counted how many comments there were.Office 2007 home can make life more better and easier. To run that solution (which was already more complex than what we were trying to do internally) it took about 1 to 2 seconds. So, if I had increased the collection to 3000, it would have been at most 20 seconds (compared to 8 hours)! MS Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.