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# Research Service Scenarios

The Research feature provides a platform for three kinds of third-party research services:

General research services

Third-party developers can write general purpose research services that Microsoft® Office 2003 users may find useful, such as a dictionary or a thesaurus.

Subscription research services

Third-parties companies can also build and advertise research services that users can subscribe to. For example, law firms may be interested in subscribing to research services for legal case reviews, reducing their time and cost on accessing government resources.

Custom research services

Corporations can build custom research services for their own corporate use.

For example, a pharmaceutical company, Contoso Pharmaceuticals, with a large internal database containing product, insurance, and sales data could create a research service that makes this data available to designated users who work with Office 2003 applications. The Research Service Software Development Kit provides detailed information about building a custom research service.

This service would consist of a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) method named Registration that registers the service on a client computer, and another SOAP method, Query, that handles client queries, retrieves the information from the database, and returns the information to the client. A user can add the service by:

1. Clicking Research options in the Research task pane.
2. Clicking Add Services in the Research Options dialog box.
3. Typing the URL of the service, as shown in Figure 1.

The user adds the service by typing the URL in the Address box.

Figure 1: Adding a research service manually

Alternatively, the user could use one of the deployment methods described in the Deployment Overview.

After adding the new service Contoso Reference, the user searches for “Blood Pressure” on the Contoso research service and returns the results shown in Figure 2. Key corporate data is now available where the user needs it.

Figure 2: Results from a search on the custom research service

## Easy configuration

Regardless of whether a research service is built for a more general group of users or a specific group of corporate users, Office 2003 applications can be used to access research services installed on a local machine, on a corporate server within the firewall, or on a server on the Internet outside the firewall, as shown in figure 3. This is because all communications between an Office 2003 client and a research service take place over HTTP.

Office 2003 applications can use services on:

Office 2003 Client

Corporate Information Provider behind a firewall

Information Provider outside firewall

Figure 3: Possible locations for Office 2003 client and research service

## Easy conversion

Because research services are based on HTTP, SOAP, and XML, information providers of existing information services that use XML to communicate their data can use the Research Service SDK to make their services Office-compatible.

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