“Is it possible to get a few of us together to look at what areas of our software would be hit by Office 365? Another team is testing the integration and needs our assistance on the affected areas.”
Becky
In our software, we already integrate with Microsoft Word, but it relies on it being installed on that user’s computer. This request from Becky seemed like a random request, and there’s definitely a lot more information she needs to provide here.
So I asked “Have there been changes to our software to handle this? I don’t really get what this means. Instead of loading the locally-installed Word, is it going to launch a browser with Word in it? Does this include other aspects like Outlook, Excel etc”.
There’s loads of features of Office 365, do they want Outlook, Teams, Excel, Powerpoint or more to work? It simply isn’t going to work without us adding compatibility for it. Interacting with a Web Application (Word running inside a browser like Microsoft Edge) is completely different to interacting with a Desktop Application (Word running as a standalone software). The former will need to call an API/Web-Service, the latter is interacting with DLL files on the computer.
It turns out it was just the desktop Word application you can install via your O365 subscription. So it wasn’t really anything to do with O365 really. I found out because she eventually forwarded me an email. It had literally everything someone would need to answer her original question, it’s just that she didn’t bother sharing it.
Additionally, the other team already had a list of affected areas, and what she really wanted to know if there were any other aspects they didn’t consider.
So why did she ask such a vague question, and why suggest we would be doing the analysis from scratch?
What a waste of time. Absolutely infuriating. How many blogs am I writing about her poor communication?
Stranger Coding Tings 