When introducing the Ribbon UI in Office 2007, we also introduced the RibbonX (Ribbon extensibility) model, a new way to programmatically customize the Office UI. RibbonX enables 3rd party developers and solution providers to build on top of the Ribbon by authoring custom tabs and groups, targeting scenarios unique to and optimized for their customers.

Office 2010 extends the span of the UI extensibility platform by providing support for customization of the new Backstage view. It also adds several new, powerful features to the existent RibbonX platform.

Extending the Backstage View

The Backstage view is a new integral part of the Office UI. It elevates the file-level features (printing, sharing, distributing, collaborating, etc.) the way the Ribbon elevated document creation features. Making it easy for 3rd parties to extend the Backstage view’s immersive UI in meaningful ways is a large area of our extensibility focus in Office 2010.

One may ask – “when is it appropriate to extend the Ribbon and when the Backstage view?” If you are building a solution that targets document editing and content generation scenarios (i.e. your features will be helping customers when working in the document), extending the Ribbon is the way to go. If, on the other hand, your customers need a solution that helps them work with documents, processes and custom workflows that those documents are associated with, extending the Backstage is the recommended approach.

Example 1 – Efficient Project/Process Management via Custom Backstage Tab

More than ever in the past, today’s documents evolve via collaborative efforts, shifting through various stages and cycles. Processes that those documents are tied to are often highly customized and organization-specific. The Backstage view offers a great place to expose custom info about documents and those idiosyncratic processes, and enable users to “move” those documents through various stages.

Below is an add-in that adds a custom Contoso Process tab to the Backstage view; all of the custom UI in the example is built using the new Backstage extensibility model. Contoso Process tab displays relevant metadata about the spreadsheet and the phase it is in, as well as remaining steps that need to be taken for the spreadsheet to progress to the next stage. Schedule For Design Phase and Open Design Issues groups are red, indicating issues that require immediate attention. The graph on the right provides “bigger picture,” a summary of where in the process all of the other related spreadsheets are. It is easy to imagine how all of this custom metadata could be pulled from a SharePoint library which hosts the spreadsheets.



The Contoso Process UI displays custom metadata and contextually-aware custom UI for process management

Once all of the open design issues are resolved, Exit Design Phase button on top of the tab can be enabled programmatically. Clicking it moves the spreadsheet into the legal review phase and the tab updates its content dynamically to show the new status and the requirements for the new phase.



The Contoso Process UI updates dynamically to reflect the new phase spreadsheet has been moved to

Example 2 – Integrating Custom Features with Built-in Backstage Tabs

Imagine you are a solution developer, and sharing documents is a common scenario for your customers. They like the capabilities of the built-in Share tab in the Backstage view, but they also want a direct way to exchange their documents via Windows Live Hotmail and Facebook. Backstage extensibility empowers you to create and integrate both of these custom features into the built-in Share tab.

Here is what the customized Send Using E-Mail form would look like with the Send via Hotmail group added (the bottom right of the picture):



Custom Send via Hotmail group is integrated into the built-in Send Using E-mail form

And, here is what the customized Share tab would look like with the new Post to Facebook task (and the associated form) added:



Built-in Share tab is extended with a custom Post to Facebook task

Example 3 – Adding Quick, Custom File-Level Commands to the Backstage View

Now imagine you are a developer and your customers do a lot of intense data editing in multiple documents simultaneously. They open and close documents frequently, and they don’t want to be prompted to save changes when closing documents.

With the Backstage view extensibility, you can easily replace the built-in Close command with a custom Save and Close control which automatically saves the document before closing it.







Navigation pane in the Backstage before and after the change to replace built-in Close with custom Save & Close

Backstage View Extensibility – High-Level Overview for Developers

Backstage customizations are defined in the same markup file that contains Ribbon and context menu customizations; the Backstage is just another top-level node. Its internal hierarchy is in many ways similar to the Ribbon’s. Primarily, just like the Ribbon, the Backstage uses tabs as its core building blocks. Backstage tabs can contain either one or two columns of groups. The custom Contoso Process tab from the earlier example contains two columns:



Unlike the Ribbon, the Backstage can also host buttons at the top level – they show up as fast commands in the navigation pane, like the Save and Close command from our earlier example.

While groups in the Ribbon and the Backstage have different spatial organization of content, they can host numerous identical control types, with callbacks (custom functions that define unique control behaviors and which are being called by Office code) for those controls being same across the two.

More details on the Backstage extensibility, its structure and features will be provided in the upcoming Beta documentation. As the Beta build of Office 2010 becomes publicly available, the documentation will be published at the Office Developer Center on MSDN, and will include the full Backstage XML schema, the list of built-in control IDs, a comprehensive introductory article on Backstage extensibility, as well as numerous Backstage extensibility code samples.

Office Menu Customizations from Office 2007

If your solution customized the Office Menu in Office 2007, it will keep working in Office 2010. All of the custom functionality that was added to the Office Menu shows up in the Add-Ins flyout in the Backstage’s navigation pane:



Custom Office Menu additions (from Office 2007) show up in the Backstage’s navigation pane

RibbonX Platform Improvements

Tab activation and group auto-scaling are frequently requested features we hear from developers who create Ribbon solutions. Tab activation enables developers to activate a tab on demand; this brings the tab to the foreground (as if it were selected) in response to some event. Group auto-scaling enables custom Ribbon groups to adapt their layout to best match the horizontal window size. Improving context menu extensibility is another feature request we hear often. We addressed all these requests in Office 2010.

Tab Activation Support

Imagine a scenario in which you have built an Excel solution with several custom tabs. If each of your custom tabs pertains to a particular type of data, you may want to ensure that the appropriate tab is brought to the foreground when the user interacts with corresponding data type. You achieve this using the ActivateTab method on the IRibbonUI object (passing to it a String-type parameter specifying the custom tab to activate):

IRibbonUI.ActivateTab(String tabID).

You can use a “parallel” ActivateTabMso method to activate a built-in tab and ActivateTabQ method to activate a tab shared between multiple add-ins (ActivateTabQ requires an extra String-type parameter that specifies the namespace of the target add-in).

Custom Group Auto-Scaling

You have probably noticed that built-in Ribbon groups change their layout when you resize the window. When the window is larger, groups in the Ribbon use the space to show labels or “grow” the size of some commands; as the window shrinks down, groups adapt and “pack” more functionality into less space.

Imagine if customers of your solution want to run with non-maximized windows so they can have multiple applications visible simultaneously. However, when they make the application window smaller, they don’t want commands in your custom group to immediately resize into a single button and be an extra click away. Without having to define when or exactly how your custom group scales, in Office 2010 you can just indicate that the group should adaptively change its layout (by setting its autoScale property to “true”), and Office will ensure that it best fits within the changing window size.

Here is an example that shows how an add-in group would scale using autoScale=true; note that you should assign an icon to the group itself as the icon will be used when the group finally transforms into a single button:



In Office 2010 a custom group can change its layout to best fit within the resized application window

Context Menu Extensibility

If you are building solutions on top of Office and efficient access to frequently-used, contextual functionality is important for users of your solutions, you have probably considered customizing right-click menus. Some context menus have been extensible via the CommandBars Object Model. However, there are context menus that can’t be changed this way; for example, PowerPoint 2007 contains context menus that aren’t accessible via the CommandBars OM. And, several control types (galleries, split-buttons) can’t be added to context menus via the CommandBars OM.

In Office 2010, you can rely on the familiar RibbonX model to also customize context menus. All of the control types supported in built-in menus can now be added to customized context menus. Context menus are accessible in Office 2010 as a new top-level node in the custom UI markup, the same markup that already hosts the Ribbon.





Customized cell context menu in Excel with a custom split-button, gallery and a separator added

Conclusion

The new Backstage extensibility platform and Ribbon extensibility enhancements empower you to build Office 2010 solutions that are even richer than the ones you could build in the past. We hope that you have already started using these features in the Technical Preview build of Office 2010 and we greatly appreciate your continuous feedback.

- Mirko Mandic, Office User Experience Program Manager

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Posted By: z3r010
03 Nov 2009