I heard a few months ago that Office Web Components were not going to be included in Office 2007 and wouldn’t be developed any further; here at last is the official confirmation from the Excel 2007 blog:
We’re meant to use Excel Services or Excel instead – and I’m sure that you’ll probably agree that neither of these are ideal (unless you’ve drunk the Office 2007 Kool-aid) replacements for scenarios where people have been using OWC to connect to Analysis Services. For instance, how would you replace OWC in BI Development Studio with either Excel or Excel Services? What we really need are a set of .Net pivot table controls similar to CellsetGrid or the Dundas equivalents. I feel a Connect coming on…
UPDATE: I just read the following interview with Alex Payne on www.tdwi.org:
http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8077
I quote: "[So one of] the things we’re going to do is make the ProClarity objects be able to be used by more people than ever before….When I look at things like decomposition trees and perspective and other things they have in their arsenal, we’re going to use that stuff to help us go deeper. " Perhaps we’ll see the Proclarity controls positioned as the OWC/AS replacement?
Chris,I am currently developing one of these for the company I work for (Interscape, Inc). I hope that you will check out our latest beta version. It will soon be out of beta, at which point we will be working on a .net 2.0 version with even more functionality. Here\’s the link: http://interscapeinc.com/52.html We welcome any feedback!Michael Stuart
If this is the case then Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio will have a big change. What will be used to browse cube? Right now it is the Pivot Table component from OWC. Proclarity Analytics Lite?
To tell the truth after reading Alex Payne answer I\’m more puzzled then before.Can someone understand Ms ROADMAP on this ? When some one want to develop rich web client for BI (dashbord, cube browser, or sorry to mention some data mining models like decision trees) based upon ssas 2005 without tearing his sculp apart what is the platform to choose ?