OWC to Bite the Dust
Just learned from the David Gainer’s post, that Microsoft has made a decision to retire Office Web Components (OWC) in favor of Excel Services. This is definitely sad news for me. While I agree that Excel Services could fulfill some of the integration scenarios mentioned in the comments for that post, I can think of at least two scenarios where this won’t be the case:
- You need a cost effective and easy way to provide OLAP features in your applications. The Office Server pricing model has not been announced yet but it could be intimidating for small companies or application vendors. Not to mention that SharePoint requires Windows Server.
- You need to embed an OLAP browser in your Windows Forms application. Currently, I don’t know of a way to embed an Excel spreadsheet on a Windows Form (VSTO, Excel Services, VBA, etc. don’t support this). Not to mention that if browsing cubes is the only thing you need, installing and maintaining the entire Office Server stack may be a difficult proposition.
IMO, it could have been great if the OWC were replaced with a web and Windows Forms OLAP viewers similar to the VS.NET report viewers for SSRS 2005. This would have given developers a light-weight alternative for UDM application integration. Now, we have to wait for third-party vendors to fill in the void. Sigh…
