Executive Summary
Problem and Purpose
BYU OIT has been developing webservices for registration webpages, people soft services and other general services BYU provides, to increased functionality to all departments on campus. Users across campus will be able to access these services through soaregistry.byu.edu and are available by access to anyone with self-service permissions. In efforts to support BYU in promoting webservices, I decided it would be prudent to develop an example of consuming the webservices in VBA and provide a framework for others to follow.
Overview
Consuming BYU webservices through excel extends the use and functionality of these services to several important users across campus, such as, accountants, deans, teachers, and students. The original idea of this project was to provide a worksheet that would allow anyone with excel and internet access to use these services whenever they wanted and allow developers to quickly implement additional webservices. The problem that was faced was VBA does not support SHA-512 encryption; therefore, I had to write a dll file to extend the functionality of excel.
Currently development of the project is through the creation of a C# class that will create and register a dll in Excel. This is a manual and rigid process and is not a viable solution for end users to implement; however, the program does work and provides a stable starting point for other developers to expand on what I have done. The program presents a user a worksheet with buttons that provide access to the web services. When a user clicks a button, it will ask for authentication, if not already authenticated. The webservices uses the credentials to authenticate the end user to the webserver and then the webserver provides information back. The worksheet then takes the user to a new worksheet where the information is displayed.
Conclusions
I hope that my project will provide an example to other developers to begin development in Excel to give teachers and faculty increase easy and functionality of OIT’s services. Also I hope it will improve OIT In the following ways:
· Demonstrate support to other departments that OIT is a friendly, supportive and competent organization.
· Remove Duplicate code found on different servers that are gathering web data that could be done through a webservice.
· Have more users understand the power of Excel and webservices.
Here are my links
No comments:
Post a Comment