Agave web extensions

The Microsoft enterprise blog has an article up about Agave web extensions and Office programmability that I took a shine to.

The integration between the Office suite and SharePoint have been missing an easy way for programmers to create solutions that brings the two together. These new shiny rumored objects are interesting.

Lets consider them from the context of the relationship that currently exists between Excel and the SharePoint BI offering. Microsoft could have tried to move people away from Excel to more powerful tools better suited for the purpose of creating business intelligence solutions. But instead they choose to allow people to leverage Excel and PowerPivot as powerful BI self-service solutions where a simple Excel sheet can act as a full fledged datasource. The philosophy of letting people use the tools they are familiar with to provide business value as well as offering more advanced tools that can be used when needed seems to be the underlining strategy going forward.

The new programmability could bring the same mindset into the rest of Microsoft's offering. Extend, don't reinvent.

Further tying SharePoint into the stack as the center of information distribution and collaboration seems like a great strategy, not just for us active in the business, but for the enterprise as well.