As part of a project im doing at work, I am trying to make a client side application that can upload and download files from Microsoft office live. In the end, it will need to be integrated into Microsoft office via our Autotag add-in. Lets start with the problems.
- NO Documentation for workspace, and as far as I know, there is no 3rd party support for working with workspace
- Poor documentation for Office Live Small Business API's
- LiveIDSamples code samples from Microsoft does not work
- It would be useful for testing authentication and pulling down files from a Small Business account.
- Office Live forums are USELESS !! Me and my boss have posts many weeks old with no response
- Our paid support with MSFT is just as useless, no one seems to know what im talking about.
What I don't get is why MS is making it so difficult to develop for office live. I have written a small console app which will hit a URL, and using either webDAV or FPRPC, will attempt to download the contents of the file. It fails in workspace.
Another part of my project is to get the 'Microsoft Office Live Workspace' to show up as a folder in one of our Open File Dialog boxes. In vista I am having trouble setting up a proper web folder. In XP im having trouble getting my web folder it show up in OUR standard open file dialog box. It only shows the 5 defualt ones, even though I added some to the User Defined places in the registry.
Here is a list of questions that I need answers to from Microsoft:
Outstanding Questions for Office Live
- Can we register as a developer to receive better support ?
- How do we become an Office Live Small Business Partner?
- What are the benefits of becoming a Partner ? what is the process?
- Why does the LiveIDSamples code sample fail for me, I have a workspace setup with Documents in it ?
- What happened to dev.officelive.com ? Is ask.officelive.com/smallbusiness , the new site ?
- Where is the best place to post questions ? Which forum ? What about email/phone support ?
- Do I need to upload code to my Office Live Small Business Site to access documents from its workspace ?
- Besides the Workspace that lives inside of one's office live, are there other places to upload and store documents ?
- Do you plan on introducing 3rd party API's for office live workspace ?
- How do I set up a web folder to access my office live workspace ?
- Is it broken in vista ? I have tried to install patches that are referenced in a forum post on the Office Live Forum, but when I try to install, they all come back saying that "These updates do not apply to my System".
- How do I get the User Defined 'Places' to show up in Windows XP, inside of an open file dialog box ? They show up in the standard word open dialog box, but the one in our Add-in only shows the 5 default ones.
Here are some forum posts my boss and I have made over the past few weeks trying to get answers to our questions:
OpenFileDialog - get Microsoft Live files
Read a file in OfficeLive - from an Office AddIn
Accessing a Live file from within a Word AddIn
Help with Office Live Small business code sample - LiveIDSamples

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