David had this to say (quite disdainfully ) about my theorizing about getting data out of Jazz into MS Excel and MS Project:

Instead of a one-way data transfer from Jazz to Microsoft documents, I think a much more useful exercise would be to extend MS Office to make it Jazz aware. This would allow the Office applications to behave as Jazz clients much like Microsoft and others have done for VSTS. Without Jazz awareness, I feel that these other applications would be limited to reporting functions and be of little use to the project management community.

I see this more as an exercise in extending MS Office (or your application of choice) rather than extending Jazz and can understand why IBM would be looking for partners to provide such a solution for their customers.

Point is good. Point taken. I am doing precisely what Negin was complaining about - missing the project management perspective and looking at it from the developer’s perspective - but I did fool myself for a bit there that I had the answer signed, sealed and delivered.

The project manager would rather work directly from inside MS Excel, MS Project and interfaces she is familiar with - and it is far fetched to expect non-developer stake-holders to log into a Jazz client/web client and export into Project or report into Excel.

Also, Work Item information (for example) could be changing frequently and direct integration into MS Excel and MS Project provides an opportunity to refresh statuses and other work item information directly from inside a report that the project manager has open compared to having to export repeatedly from inside a Jazz client each time.

Not to fear. As with the Jazz-based solution I outlined yesterday, I have a similarly vague outline of how to do this - atleast for Excel:

As mentioned in my previous post, we already have a way to get the data off the Jazz server.

Microsoft has made it equally easy to develop applications that target the Office ecosystem through VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office - currently VSTO 2005). This means that we have application level add-in support for Office system applications like MS Excel.

Through VSTO, I can write a plug-in for Excel that puts a Jazz toolbar/ribbon in Excel and interfaces directly with the service interface of the Jazz Server to get the raw data required off Jazz. This VSTO plugin would then take care of the business logic of putting together and rendering different reports and charts based on pre-defined queries by leveraging the runtime support in MS Excel that VSTO allows.

Reverting to the developer perspective for a bit, VSTO is installed as an add-on on Visual Studio and provides very nice design-time support - just like Win-Forms controls. Makes it that much easier to develop these plug-ins.

Depending on the needs, in case we find that the Jazz service interface is too ‘raw’ for consumption, another option would be to have the Excel VSTO plug-in interact with the Jazz server through a custom Jazz service-plugin that takes care of sending the Excel plug-in well filtered and formatted data. This has some obvious advantages but in my opinion, has the decisive disadvantage of mandatorily requiring a Jazz server side plug-in without which the nice MS Excel plugin we developed will not work.

The part I am not sure about is how to implement a similar VSTO plug-in for MS Project. If I remember correctly, VSTO doesn’t offer support for MS Project development. I could be wrong.

Browsing the VSTO site is becoming a pain right now because I am on a train back to Toronto that has wifi access on board - but connectivity is sporadic at best. I’ll check up a little later and update this post. If it does have support, that’s that.
If not, a plugin can be written directly against the MS Project SDK to achieve our end.

[Update] There seem to be a couple of options for developing MS Project plugins:

• The version of VSTO that comes integrated with Visual Studio 2008 (currently in beta) has support for creating MS Project plug-ins.
• I guess you can create a COM add-in for MS Project using the MS Project SDK I mentioned above but that would be something to consider only if I couldn’t use VSTO.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 5:47 pm and is filed under General, Microsoft, Osellus, Products, The state of the art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.