Office 2003 Reference

I have now, using yet another hello world type example, used php to perform basic parsing of the XML query submitted by the Office 2003 Reference and Research module. I will have to test this when I get to work, as I do not have office 2003 here at home. Unless I have it on thelaptop I borrowed from work.. Hmmm….

Some more research down, and I relize the Research and Reference feature uses SOAP. PHP5 supports soap nativly, but 4.x does not. There are PEAR addins for PHP 4 as wel. It lookslike I will ahve to lear SOAP now if I want to do this project.

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Office 2003 Research and Reference

It was mentioned at the SIRSI SuperConference by Stepehen Abrams that libraries should add themselfves into the Microsoft Office 2003 Research and Refence feature. I think this is an interesting idea and am defintily going to explore it a littel more. From what I can tell the output has to be in XML. I think I can use the same wrapper script I used for WAP on WEB2 to enable WEB2 to talk XML for Office.
I have been reading an overview at Microsofts web site, and it definitly looks possible.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/office/office2003/operate/o3rsrch.mspx
I wonder how much effort it will take… I guess I’ll know more as I progress…
Heres a “Hello World” article on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnofftalk/html/office11062003.asp

WAP and roll

Well, I ahve been experiminting with WAP at work for the last week and a half. I have in that time added a numbe of WAP features to the librarys web site. It is now possible to login to both our catalog, and our new InterLibrary Loan account management software from your WAP enabled cell phone. On a whim I also wrote / borrowed a bit of code to output our book images in the WBMP format on the fly. So people looking at their InterLibrary Loan account can see the pictures of thier book images.