Building A Quality System in Office 365: Paul Hayes
Building A Quality System in Office 365: Paul Hayes
Building A Quality System in Office 365: Paul Hayes
in Office 365
Paul Hayes
1
The graphic is from a slide David Parker (davidp@bvisual.
net) saw in “Dive into PowerApps, building apps that mean
business without writing code” talk from Microsoft Principal
Product Manager Saurabh Pant at Microsoft Tech Summit,
Birmingham, 28th March 2017. The same message if not the
same graphic is consistent whenever Microsoft introduces
PowerApps.
software matured into the important office We now have a computing world that is
companion tools we know and love today! dominated by very powerful proprietary and
It is important to remember that open source database servers operating in a
these early programs, particularly the range of widely diverse proprietary and open
Lotus suite of programs and dBase II to source operating systems. The common
give some examples, had very powerful feature they generally all share is a common
programming facilities that today have
language for extracting and manipulating
migrated into the domain of programmers data—Standard Query Language (SQL).
as Visual Basic—which is anything but ba- Principles of data design and easy and
sic for most current power users and cit- safe use of query language have been
izen developers to use and into a whole simplified greatly since the early days of
range of languages far more powerful than office software and the offerings on Office
the Fortran, Algol, C
obol, Pascal, and oth- 365 reflect this.
ers that early adopters and users had to
master. SharePoint and Software as a Service
Hypertext, Hyperlinking,
and the Internet
As document creation and management
developed, so did the need to link i nformation
in a nonlinear manner and enable branch- SharePoint had several starting points and
ing within and between documents for ease one was as a means of rapid development
of use and to add value. So hypertext and of team websites for a company network.
hyperlinks emerged and revolutionized use Another was easy file and document sharing.
of documents in Word Processing, Presenta- SharePoint combined “network administration
tion, and Spreadsheet Software. actions with the email, c alendaring, contacts,
The internet developed from this c oncept. and to-do list technology contained within
In 1989, Berners-Lee proposed a “distributed Exchange.”2 It developed into shared document
hypertext system” for the “management of management and indexing a pplications
general information . . . at CERN” [Berners-Lee and is at the heart of Office 365. The most
1989]. The exchange of data in this proposed recent development is “Hybrid SharePoint
system was based on an interchange format Environments” providing the flexibility of
very similar to an SGML [ISO 1986] applica- using SharePoint in both a local server and
tion. This interchange format had explicit cloud-based setting. SharePoint lists e nable
representations of hypertext links and was the presentation of columns and rows of
to be used in conjunction with a protocol for table data and interfaces with databases.3
addressing and requesting documents over
a large network. Process Management
In parallel with the development of Qual-
Key Developments on the Way ity Software, the process model became
Databases and How to Query Them more central and much business system
Databases developed massively outside the
2
scope of office software and, although the History of SharePoint: The Past, Present
offerings were used so effectively in early and Future, Karim Roumani, https://www
QMSs and were good for safe use on small .portalfronthosting.com/blog/history-of-share-
point-the-past-present-and-future.pdf.
office networks, but for wider use they 3
SharePoint lists I: An introduction, https://
were completely insecure and generally support.office.com/en-gb/article/SharePoint-
lacked facilities for recovery and rollback lists-I-An-introduction-f11cd5fe-bc87-4f9e-9bfe-
when needed. bbd87a22a194.