A while ago I completed migration of my company’s justia solution to Office Live version 2. justia is a legal practice management system that was originally written in Office Live and uses a number of javascript libraries and external services to provide the functions it needs to operate.

I’ve been meaning to write about the upgrade experience for a while now. The good news it that the process was relatively painless. The only significant problem we had was that a custom master page had been used to provide some common controls (such as a timer and search button) to each screen. The new release of Office Live came with a new default master page which was quite different from the original. That meant we had to make some changes. I think the lesson here is to remember that you are on a hosted environment where much of the code is outwith your control- so don’t use custom master pages and do read the Office Live Developers guide. But hey, none of this existed when our first solution was written. Fortunately for me we had an auto-update script in the site which meant that once the master page had been updated the upgrade went smoothly.

Moving on, I was impressed with the range of new features in version 2. This is particularly true of the List Publisher Module. This module replaces the old form builder and allows the creation of online forms to capture information from business partners and customers and populate lists within Office Live. You just drop the form onto a web page in the site designer and you’re off. You can read more about this on Chris Beiter’s blog.

One of the most significant advances from a developers point of view is the solution packager. This allows Office Live solutions to be quickly packaged into solution files for distribution to customers. The new solution format (.olp) offers a number of advantages over the old site template format (.stp) as it has been specifically written for Office Live. Just a few of them include:

• The ability to package multiple individual components into a single .olp file and ship them to customers. Unlike the old .stp way this includes the ability to include elements from your Office Live web site allowing you to distribute more complete solutions with no manual intervention required after setup.
• Navigation menu settings are saved, unlike in previous versions.
• There is a much slicker interface for users importing solutions.
• From a commercial point of view it is significantly easier to promote solutions since the enhancement of the Office Live Partner Directory.

Another advance- although not strictly Office Live centered- is the release of the Windows Live ID Client which opens up the possibility for external applications to authenticate against Windows Live ID and connect to Office Live (and other) sites. The SDK wasn’t available when justia was first written which made a number of features a bit of a pain to write (if not precluding them completely). An example of using the SDK with Office Live can be found here. This opens up the market to third part applications which use Office Live as a data store or extend it’s functionality in some way. I think there is a particular market here for Microsoft Office addins. It also provides a mechanism for providing IPR and revenue protection via external services- but I’ll save that one for a future post.

The business applications seem to have been enhanced significantly too. In general terms the user interface is slicker and more attractive, not to mention that it works on Firefox as well as Internet Explorer (which it didn’t previously). Once thing I’ve been exploring recently is the use of SilverLight to provide custom controls within Office Live which access data via the web services. This is a great way to provide a slick user interface whilst providing a little IPR protection along the way. This too I’ll save for a later post.

With version 2 of Office Live, I can see a great deal more potential for Office Live solution developers to build vertical market applications and bring them to an ever increasing market. This is particularly true as widespread skills such as web development and SharePoint can be leveraged to reduce the learning curve. I’m now looking forward to building other solutions on the platform!