Chapter 9. Extending Office Server

There are many ways to develop functionality to extend the capabilities of your SharePoint server, such as developing Web Parts, authoring workflows, and using the SharePoint object model to perform code-based operations. This chapter covers two methods SharePoint provides to extend the SharePoint functionality by defining features and configuring Excel Services so that you can publish Excel workbooks for HTML access to the data.

The feature capabilities within SharePoint provide a structure so that you can define a number of operations using XML files without writing any additional code. The use of features within SharePoint is so pervasive that many of the more than one hundred features defined by SharePoint are implemented using feature definitions such as document libraries, the issue list template, and the report center functionality. Features allow you to target your extended SharePoint functionality for exactly the audience you want through four levels of deployment—the farm, the Web application, a site collection, or a Web site. This chapter discusses both authoring a feature definition and installing and activating your feature.

Excel Services is another way to extend the capabilities of SharePoint by allowing you to publish Excel workbooks, often a cornerstone of corporate knowledge, in a secure manner that allows connections to trusted data, and publishes workbooks in an HTML format without requiring file conversation, while still securing the underlying data and formulas. Excel Calculation Services, which is a component of Excel Services, enables the capability to perform calculations in published worksheets while still in the browser page. This chapter walks through the steps to make Excel Services work for your organization in a flexible yet trusted way. Excel Services require MOSS and are not available for WSS-only deployments.