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I'd so much like to
get my hands on InfoPath.
Just some weeks ago
- at a developer conference - we've been chatting about the current state of
software engineering where I came to my sad conclusion:
What we have here,
is a circular problem:
- Right now, it
simply takes too long for the customer's IT department to create a
solution.
- Therefore, some
power users take the power in their own hands and write customer calculation
sheet in Excel and share them with their department.
- Some other
departments happen to have similar problems and take a similar route to
solving them.
- The company ends
up with multiple versions of a number of different Excel calculations for
the same business transaction.
- The company's customers complain
because they get different information - and even different quotes - depending
on which department they call.
- The enterprise IT department decides to break the
circle by completely replace all the 100s of Excel sheets by a real,
full-blown, highly integrated CRM solution.
- It takes
some months or even years to do so.
- In the meantime,
the users need some calculations to be done.
- Therefore, some
power users take the power in their own hands and write customer calculation
sheet in Excel and share them with their department.
- GOTO 3
(anybody still wonders why GOTO is considered
harmful)
And no, this story
isn't made up. Let me just quote one of the folks at this conference:
"I truly believe that most of this world's business logic is
implemented in Excel".
I therefore
concluded - some weeks ago, before knowing about InfoPath - that corporate
IT departments need some way to expose their web services in
a manner that makes it easier for power users (and developers) to simply
re-use it instead of re-writing it. In current IT culture - and that's sad but
true - it's somehow easier for the users to write their own stuff instead. We'd
need something as easy as Microsoft Office which one could point at a Schema or
a WSDL and which would generate some client side web service interface.
This was
some weeks ago - before I even heard of InfoPath.
I'd so much like
to get my hands on InfoPath.
Now the only part
missing is some great new application, easy as Excel, running on the
server, allowing power users and developers to actually enter and modify
their business logic calculations in these central locations.
We'll eventually get
there.
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