PALM SPRINGS, Calif., Oct. 7, 1996 — Microsoft Corp. today announced Microsoft® Office 97, Developer Edition, a new edition of Microsoft Office for developers, at the Office 97 Developer Conference. In addition, Microsoft announced Mastering Office 97 Development, a multimedia training product for developers to learn how to build solutions with the new features of Microsoft Office 97.
Microsoft Office 97, Developer Edition is designed for the more than 1 million developers who use Microsoft Office to build business solutions. It has everything needed to build and distribute solutions with Microsoft Office in one product, including Microsoft Office 97, Professional Edition, software tools, printed documentation, sample code, and distribution licensing for the royalty-free Microsoft Access runtime and other development tools.
Mastering Office 97 Development, the newest member of the Mastering Series of interactive multimedia training products, provides developers with hands-on training for building solutions with Microsoft Office 97. Mastering Office 97 Development includes over 40 hours of training, including labs and extensive code samples.
“Our introduction of Microsoft Office 97, Developer Edition and Mastering Office 97 Development recognizes the widespread developer support of our vision of Microsoft Office programmability – a vision now fully realized with the ability to reuse all Microsoft Office 97 features in solutions and the addition of Visual Basic® for Applications 5.0 to all Office applications,”
said Richard Fade, vice president of the desktop applications division at Microsoft.
“Microsoft is also enabling developers to make optimal use of their skills and extend their products by the licensing of Visual Basic for Applications 5.0 to leading ISVs.”
Microsoft announced the licensing program for Visual Basic for Applications in June 1996.
All new features in Microsoft Office 97 – including the new Microsoft Outlook
™
97 desktop information manager with programmable e-mail, scheduling, task and contact management capabilities; the OfficeArt graphics engine; Command Bars; and the Office Assistant – are reusable, leading to shorter development cycles for building custom solutions.
Visual Basic for Applications is the most widely used desktop development environment. Visual Basic for Applications 5.0 is enhanced with IntelliSense
™
technology, which provides on-the-fly programming assistance for faster development and includes Microsoft Forms with ActiveX
™
Control (formerly OLE Control) support, enabling developers to add specialized user interfaces to their solutions. With Visual Basic for Applications 5.0 licensing, Microsoft Office 97, Microsoft Project, Visual Basic and third-party applications will share a common development environment that enables developers to take advantage of their skills across many applications.
Microsoft Office 97 makes it easier to build solutions that connect to virtually all kinds of information, including server-side databases, messaging systems, the Internet and corporate intranets.
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New ODBCDirect technology provides high-speed, optimized data access to server-side databases such as Microsoft SQL Server
™
. -
Microsoft Outlook 97 can be reused in workgroup solutions to integrate with Microsoft Exchange Server.
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Microsoft Office 97 includes new intranet features such as Hyperlinks, Save As HTML, and Publish to the Web for integrating solutions with corporate intranets or the Internet.
“The combination of Microsoft Office 97 and ODBCDirect means we can add high-speed data access to client/server solutions built with any Microsoft Office application,”
said Robert Erman, director of Office development at Micro-Modeling Associates Inc., a solution provider specializing in Microsoft Office development.
“This technology will open up new markets for solutions built with Microsoft Office.”
Designed to be the most complete Office-based development suite, Microsoft Office 97, Developer Edition includes the following components:
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Microsoft Office 97, Professional Edition, which includes Microsoft Access 97, Microsoft Excel 97, the PowerPoint 97 presentation graphics program, Word 97 and Outlook 97
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Visual Basic for Applications 5.0, the shared development environment for Microsoft Office and the next versions of Microsoft Project and Visual Basic
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Royalty-free runtime license for distributing Microsoft Access solutions
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Setup Wizard for creating familiar setup routines that work like those in Office
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Microsoft Access and Visual SourceSafe
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Integration Tools that enable easy management of team development with the Microsoft Visual SourceSafe project-oriented version control software tool -
Replication Manager for adding sophisticated data-replication capabilities to solutions, including support for Internet Replication and Partial Replicas
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HTTP, FTP, Gopher and other ActiveX Controls – reusable software components that extend the capabilities of Microsoft Office 97
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Printed developer documentation on building solutions with Microsoft Office 97
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Technical information and code samples from the Microsoft Developer Network
“Our customers want easy-to-use business solutions, and we’re developing with Microsoft Office because we can reuse the capabilities of Office to develop these solutions faster,”
said Ken Moss, president and founder of Moss Micro Inc.
“Microsoft Office 97, Developer Edition is a huge leap forward because it provides all the essential tools for developing with Microsoft Office in one product.”
Microsoft Office 97, Developer Edition and Mastering Office 97 Development will be available in stores at about the same time as Microsoft Office 97. The Office Developer Web site ( http://www.microsoft.com/officedev/ ) includes further information on these new products and information on developing solutions with Microsoft Office 97 and Visual Basic for Applications 5.0.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing every day.
Microsoft, Visual Basic, Outlook, IntelliSense, ActiveX, PowerPoint and Visual SourceSafe are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
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