MSDN: Office 2003b2 links galore....

I'm happy to see Microsoft responding with some meaty MSDN articles to answer the various questions from us early-adopters of Office 2003.

Microsoft Office Word 2003 Beta 2 Preview (part 1 of 1)
Microsoft Office Word 2003 Beta 2 Preview (Part 2 of 2)
Microsoft Office Word 2003 XML Object Model Overview
Using the XML Features of the Microsoft Office Access 2003 and Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Object Models
Customizing the Microsoft Office 2003 Research Task Pane
Developing Smart Tag Solutions with Microsoft Office Access 2003 Beta 2
Important Security Notes for Microsoft Outlook COM Add-In Developers

I really liked this set of guidelines for deciding when to use the various technologies for Office development:

When to Use VBA, Smart Documents, "Visual Studio Tools for Office," and Other Office 2003 Solution Options

With all of these current and new coding options available to Office developers in the near future, one big question remains—which option should you choose for a particular Office 2003 solution project?

• You should continue to use VBA when your solution requires code to live in, and travel attached to, a document; or your solution involves simple macros (or recorded macros) that directly access the built-in Office COM-based object models.
• You should continue to use application specific add-ins when you want to create application-specific template code that applies, for instance, to just Excel, and you feel that COM technologies and COM-based type libraries meet your solution needs.
• You should continue to use Office COM add-ins when you want to: create a combination of generic and application-specific code across several Office applications, manage individual desktop deployment issues such as versioning, code an add-in for an Office application other than Word 2003 or Excel 2003, or feel comfortable using COM for your solution needs.
• You should consider using Office managed add-ins when you want to create an Office add-in using the power of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework along with the Office 2003 primary interop assemblies.
• Smart tags should be considered when you want to execute context-sensitive actions in Word 2003 documents, Excel 2003 workbooks, Outlook 2003 items, PowerPoint 2003 presentations, or Access 2003 databases. They are also useful for tagging data with meaningful types that are important to your business for later searching and reuse.
• Smart documents are a great choice for Word 2003 XML-based documents and Excel 2003 XML-based workbooks when you want to allow a customized task pane to interact with both the Office file and the user to enhance solutions' capabilities. They also provide a simplified and more secure deployment model than COM add-ins.
• You should consider using Microsoft "XDocs" when you want to have users fill out structured business forms and integrate the business forms' underlying XML data into business processes.
• Finally, "Visual Studio Tools for Office" is an ideal candidate for Word 2003 documents and templates and Excel 2003 documents when you want Office to harness the power of Visual Studio .NET 2003, the .NET Framework version 1.1, and the Office 2003 primary interop assemblies by directly calling remotely-updateable Visual Basic .NET or Visual C# .NET code instead of VBA code.