Microsoft Office System
Customer Solution Case Study
Microsoft IT Uses Open XML Formats to
Deliver Scorecarding Solution over the Web
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Information technology
“Open XML will play a huge role as far as OBA
development goes. It’s a new frontier.”
Sergei Gundorov, Senior Technology Architect, Microsoft IT Team
Customer Profile
Based in Redmond, Washington, the
Microsoft IT Business Intelligence Center of
Excellence Core Scorecard Team has seven
people who develop solutions for Microsoft
executives worldwide.
Business Situation
The Microsoft IT Team needed to Webenable an interactive decision support
application based on Microsoft® Office
Excel® 2003 and used by more than 3,000
Microsoft executives around the world.
Solution
The team used Excel Services in Microsoft
Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to enable
Web delivery. But Excel Services doesn’t
support VBA code, so the team used Open
XML Formats to preserve the application’s
rich interactivity.
Benefits
 Increased programmability
 Improved data recovery
 More robust file format
 Reduced file size
The Microsoft IT Business Intelligence Center of Excellence Core
Scorecard Team created a Microsoft® Office Excel®–based
interactive decision support application that was used by more than
3,000 executives and financial analysts worldwide. When the team
received a directive to Web-enable its application to reach more
people, it turned to Excel Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint®
Server 2007. However, Excel Services doesn’t support the
embedded macros in the application for distribution over the Web.
The team used Open XML Formats to manipulate the application’s
file parts and changed the file type to a macro-enabled file. Now
more than 5,700 people are accessing the application through their
browsers without losing any functionality. The team’s strategy
solved a common business problem: how to maintain the rich
interactivity of client applications and take advantage of the reach
of Web application delivery.
“Around the world, more
than 3,000 people at
Microsoft relied on their
interactive scorecard
solution to run the
business.”
Mike Reese, Senior Program Manager,
Microsoft
Situation
The Microsoft IT Business Intelligence Center
of Excellence Core Scorecard Team is a
seven-member team that supports the
business intelligence needs of Microsoft
Corporate Finance executives and financial
analysts around the world.
In June 2003, the Microsoft IT Team received
a directive from senior Microsoft
management to build an interactive
scorecard solution to support executives’
decision-making. The team responded with
an application, dubbed the Executive
Reporting User Interface Infrastructure,
written in the Microsoft® Visual Basic® for
Applications (VBA) development system. The
solution offered a rich, Microsoft Office
Excel®–based client application that
contained code to connect to a relational
database that pulled information from more
than 40 internal data sources to deliver
accounting, sales, marketing, and finance
metrics. Executives and managers used the
Executive Reporting User Interface
Infrastructure to manipulate and analyze
these statistics to gain a better
understanding of the business. Over the
years, the Microsoft IT Team continued to
develop the rich client application using
models created in Office Excel and it has
been very popular.
However, when Kevin Turner, Chief Operating
Officer at Microsoft, joined the company in
August 2005, he wanted the team to Webenable the rich client application so it would
reach more than the 3,000 people currently
using it. Turner also reasoned that taking the
application online would reduce the cost of
deploying and maintaining the application on
the desktop and preclude the need for
executives and analysts to become involved
in installations or upgrades.
In order to meet Turner’s requirements, the
Microsoft IT Team turned to Excel Services in
Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
Excel Services is an Office SharePoint Server
technology that people can use to view and
interact with Microsoft Office Excel 2007
workbooks as interactive reports in a Web
browser. Excel workbooks are published to
the Web by using a Web Part called Excel
Web Access.
“We wanted to continue taking advantage of
the business intelligence and data
visualization capabilities in Office Excel
2007,” says Sergei Gundorov, Senior
Technology Architect, Microsoft IT Team.
“However, we faced a challenge in
maintaining the rich interactivity we had built
into our client application and delivering it
over the Internet. Because Excel Services
does not support VBA code, and embedded
ActiveX controls can’t be exposed through the
Excel Web Access Web Part, we were left
looking at a stripped-down version of our
application.”
“Around the world, more than 3,000 people
at Microsoft relied on their interactive
scorecard solution to run the business,” says
Senior Program Manager Mike Reese,
Microsoft. “Taking away functionality wasn’t
an option. We also wanted to maintain other
benefits of the rich client application. For
example, the browser today has nowhere
near the rich client application’s ability to
provide board room quality printouts of the
executive suite of reports. Printing
requirements would best be met by bringing
Web-based content back to the client. We
also wanted the ability for executives to edit
scorecards without IT involvement.”
Solution
The Microsoft IT Team took advantage of
Open XML Formats in 2007 Microsoft Office
system applications to solve this problem.
Open XML replaces the binary formats of
Microsoft Office 2003 programs and offers
significant benefits to developers interested
in creating Office Business Applications
(OBAs). OBAs combine the Microsoft Office
client programs and Microsoft Office server
infrastructure with back-end business
applications. With Open XML, developers can
unlock the contents of Microsoft Office files
to enable this interoperability with enterprise
systems.
“The flexibility,
programmability, and
object model of Open
XML allowed us to put
all our functionality back
into an Excel file and
still enjoy the benefits of
a Web delivery and a
rich Excel client.”
Sergei Gundorov, Senior Technology Architect,
Microsoft IT Team
Open XML files are stored in a ZIP archive for
packaging and compression. Most parts are
XML files that describe application data,
metadata, and customer data. However, a
major advantage of Open XML is that
developers can add different parts to an
Open XML document, including binary parts,
custom-defined XML parts, and even
embedded code, macros, and images.
Developers can also programmatically
change these parts on the server, without
launching rich client applications, as it was
done in the days before Excel Services and
Open XML.
Gundorov and the team took advantage of
Open XML to replace the features that they
had to remove from their Excel-based client
application to be able to publish the content
through the Excel Web Access Web Part. They
also added a feature that provides the ability
to add digitally-signed VBA code for
additional, client-side interactivity. They
called the new iteration of their application
Core Scorecarding Platform User Interface
(CoSco).
“Open XML came to our rescue,” says
Gundorov. “With the flexibility,
programmability, and object model of Open
XML, we are enabling Web delivery of content
created in a rich Excel-based client
application, without sacrificing any desired
functionality.”
Because Excel Services is a component of
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,
employees who use the new scorecarding
solution can also take advantage of
SharePoint collaborative features while
benefiting from server-based performance.
Gundorov and his team turned to the
Microsoft .NET Framework Class Library and
used System.IO.Packaging namespace to
manipulate the document parts in a basic
Microsoft Office 2007 XML workbook (.xlsx
and .xlsb), which, today, are the only file
formats that Excel Web Access supports.
They got around this problem by using the
Open XML Object Model to add binary parts
that store digitally-signed VBA code and
changing the file to a macro-enabled
workbook. Macro-enabled files have the
same file format as macro-free files, the only
difference being the addition of a binary part
that contains VBA code. Because they are
differentiated by the file name extension
.xlsm, users or software applications are able
to identify that it contains code. With this
safeguard in place, the Microsoft IT team can
build and deliver its new solution via the Web
with confidence that it complies with
Microsoft internal security policies.
The IT Team released CoSco in August 2007
and it’s now in use across the enterprise. “We
used the System.IO.Packaging namespace
because the Open XML Formats Software
Development Kit (SDK) 2.0 hadn’t been
released yet,” says Gundorov. “While we
achieved efficient time to market of only one
week for that project, we are now integrating
the Open XML SDK 2.0 into new work
because it makes Open XML file manipulation
so much easier. We estimate that it allows us
to reduce the amount of code required for
package part manipulation by approximately
20 to 30 percent.”
For more information on CoSco, see Creating
Business Applications by Using Excel
Services and Office Open XML Formats at:
msdn.microsoft.com/enus/library/cc540662.aspx
“Taking our Excel-based
application to the Web
was made possible by
using Excel Services and
Open XML. Our
developers have barely
scratched the surface of
what they can do with
this new platform.”
Mike Reese, Senior Program Manager,
Microsoft
Benefits
Using Open XML, the Microsoft IT Team found
a solution of interest to any company that
wants to maintain the powerful features and
rich interactivity of Microsoft Office–based
applications running on the client, yet extend
the reach of that functionality to more
employees through Web delivery. Using Open
XML, developers can create interactive
applications that build on the functionality
inherent in any Microsoft Office program,
without having to go through that program’s
binary object model. Then they can create,
alter, or save a document, slide deck, or
spreadsheet as a plain or a macro-enabled
file type and publish it over the Web so that
it’s available to employees using only a
browser.
“Open XML enables Office application
scenarios that were previously impossible,”
confirms Gundorov. “In our case, we were
able to comply with a top-level directive to
Web-enable a key scorecarding application
for executives and deliver it to an additional
2,700 people. This is just one example of the
extensibility and potential of Open XML. Open
XML will play a huge role as far as OBA
development goes. It’s a new frontier.”
Open XML Formats not only provide rich
opportunities for developers to build OBAs
that comply with business directives to
extend the value of the 2007 Microsoft Office
system, they also contribute to a more robust,
secure, and efficient solution. “We can use
digitally signed VBA code to ensure that our
application conforms to internal Microsoft
security policies,” says Gundorov.
Increased Programmability
Thanks to the interoperability inherent in
Open XML Formats, the Microsoft IT Team
can easily build additional features into its
solution to improve its value to the business.
For example, Gundorov is planning to deliver
a feature that takes advantage of the
eventing model in Office SharePoint Server
2007 to improve the solution’s reliability. “We
are thinking of rewriting our existing code and
using the Open XML SDK 2.0 to scan
workbooks for undesirable content and to
make changes to the appropriate package
part, prior to users checking them into a
SharePoint document library,” he explains.
“This would eliminate the possibility of
anyone else downloading the workbook that
contains corrupted content and would avoid
spreading the corrupted files.”
Because CoSco uses a model of Open XML
that pertains to Office documents, the
Microsoft IT Team can provide a valuable
capability to end users: the ability to insert
custom user interface (UI) parts, even when
they download files from the Web. “We have
prototyped a scenario where it’s possible to
click on an Excel workbook hyperlink in the
browser, insert VBA code and the custom UI
part, and then download the workbook to the
client,” says Gundorov. “The workbook with
custom UI can be made to look like a
completely custom application and not Excel,
yet it comes from the Web and it’s digitally
signed. Most of our managers and executives
have numerous Excel add-ins, so the ability to
customize their files’ UI with task-specific
commands means they will no longer have to
search for commands, improving their
productivity.”
Improved Data Recovery
Because Open XML files are more robust
than those in the binary format, executives
using CoSco are assured that their business
data will remain intact. Even if a file is
corrupted, the modularity of the package
means that developers can quickly go in, find
the corrupted part, and repair it.
“Files that need to be published on the Web
can be checked for corrupted styles and
invalid name ranges: Open XML is an ideal
file format for that,” says Gundorov. “In our
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Microsoft IT
Business Intelligence Center of Excellence
Core Scorecard Team and its work on this
application, see Creating Business
Applications by Using Excel Services and
Office Open XML Formats at:
msdn.microsoft.com/enus/library/cc540662.aspx
experience, you can put the whole workbook
through a cleansing process in less than a
second. The alternative would be writing a
small VBA macro, in which case the same
process may take a couple of minutes.”
Reduced File Size
The Open XML Formats standard uses ZIP
and compression technologies to store
documents, which significantly reduces file
sizes—up to 75 percent smaller than
comparable binary documents. “Reduced file
sizes were a corollary benefit that reduced
the impact of bringing our solution to the
Web,” says Gundorov. “Our users are
streaming the application from the server
side, and because Open XML uses ZIP
compression to reduce the amount of bits
and bytes travelling from the back end to the
front end, we are saving on the bandwidth
required.”
Microsoft Office system
− Microsoft Office Excel 2007
− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
2007
 Technologies
− Excel Services in Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server 2007

Document published May 2009
The Microsoft Office system is the business
world’s chosen environment for information
work, providing the programs, servers, and
services that help you succeed by
transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft
Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office
“Taking our Excel-based application to the
Web was made possible by using Excel
Services and Open XML,” concludes Reese.
“Our developers have barely scratched the
surface of what they can do with this new
platform.”
Software and Services
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Microsoft Office System
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Microsoft .NET Framework
Open XML Formats
Open XML Software Development Kit
System.IO.Packaging Namespace