Automate Office from Anywhere
sdOffice^TM is an application that provides platform-independent and language-independent control over Microsoft Office® applications such as Excel, Word, and Outlook. Through a concise series of commands and parameters, issued by any program locally or over a network, you can automate Office applications and fully integrate them with an application.

Through this technology, application programmers in languages such as BBx, ProvideX, Cobol, Perl, Java, and C can add sophisticated Office capabilities to their applications, performing such functions as spreadsheet loading and formatting, letter writing, mail merging, appointment scheduling, emailing, and contact database synchronizing.

Software-control for Seamless Operation
Until now, users had to use “pull” technology, such as ODBC coupled with complicated VBA macros, to perform automated operations such as these. With sdOffice, now such operations can be performed under program control from a host application using live, in-memory data. The host application can be running under Windows, or on any other system, such as Linux or Unix, that has network access to the user’s workstation.

sdOffice tasks can operate visibly on a user’s workstation during normal operations, or they can be executed in background for scheduled processing or unattended operations. For example, a Unix cron job could be executed nightly to generate Excel workbooks of sales figures and have them displayed and waiting on each salesperson’s workstation when they arrive at work, or a month-end run of collection letters could be designed to execute and print automatically on a departmental printer.

Platform- and Language-Independent
sdOffice supports any language that can interface with a TCP/IP socket or Windows DDE. On Unix, interfaces have been written even in languages that don’t have native socket support by using a handle to a perl-based pipe. Pre-written command file interfaces are provided for BBx, ProvideX, Perl, and a native Windows .exe. The interface is so clean and simple you can even perform the automation task manually using telnet!