Finding and using information while creating Microsoft Office documents is a bit more seamless in Office 2003. This is made possible by the Research Task pane which offers access to Web services designed for this Office platform extension.

The Research Task pane works in Internet Explorer and all Office 2003 applications. Although building integrated applications with Office is not a new idea, the Research Task pane is also programmable through installable Web services. Bundled services with Office 2003 include things like Encarta Encyclopedia and Factiva Search. The benefits are numerous - selected words in authoring controls are immediately searched in the Research pane, and Smart Tag systems can be tied to Research actions.

We’ve managed to integrate MySmartChannels with Office Research Services but we did two things that demonstrate added benefits for enterprise workers - secure search in the Research Task pane, and secure RSS search monitoring — both features are permissions based as well. The integrated search monitoring option for RSS makes it easy to subscribe to a MySmartChannels search query using any news reader. This provides a way to subscribe to information feeds that cut across channels and Weblogs. I suspect news readers like NewsGator (already integrated into Outlook) will have to come up to speed on ways to make Research-based subscriptions more seamless (e.g., RSS auto-subscribe should be pervasive wherever subscriptions can be found, not just HTML pages).

Although an unintended consquence, we’ve become experts of sorts for integrating Web services with Microsoft Office Research Services. If you have specific questions or product requirements that involve RSS and Office 2003, give us a shout.