Building a Quality System
in Office 365
Paul Hayes is a quality practitioner,
manager, and consultant with
experience in marine renewables
testing, medical device prequalification
and inspection using the main
management standards, and those
relating to test and measurement
uncertainty and medical devices.
© Business Expert Press 978-1-94709-813-8 (2018)
www.businessexpertpress.com
Paul Hayes
Business Systems and Office 365
Microsoft has a clear message in respect of Office 365.
The tagline is: “Dive into PowerApps—Build Apps That
Figure 1: Dive Into Power Apps: Building Apps That
Mean Business Without Writing Code
Mean Business Without Writing Code.”1 The script that
accompanies this is—“Building business applications
has never been easier. There are always c­ onflicting
priorities between IT and business and most apps
­
don’t merit the time and cost of traditional software
­development. ­PowerApps is an enterprise application
platform for d
­ elivering ­line-of-business apps without
1 
The graphic is from a slide David Parker (davidp@bvisual.
net) saw in “Dive into PowerApps, building apps that mean
business without writing code” talk from Microsoft Principal
Product Manager Saurabh Pant at Microsoft Tech Summit,
Birmingham, 28th March 2017. The same message if not the
same graphic is consistent whenever Microsoft introduces
PowerApps.
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 Building a Quality System in Office 365
writing code. It ­fundamentally t­ ransforms
and a­ccelerates how o ­rganizations pro-
vide employees seamless access to busi-
ness apps and information. PowerApps
now features built-in support for the
common data model, enhanced connec-
tivity, support for more devices and in-
tegrations with other Microsoft business
offerings.”
The supporting graphic shows the ­direction
of travel back to the origins of ­office
­software and enabling citizen d ­ evelopers
and power users to provide ­applications for
digitizing line-of-business processes that
can be used with ease and effectiveness.
The aim is to solve the ­dichotomy between
concerns of the ­corporate IT department
for security, scalability, compliance, and
integration with a managed IT portfolio
and the user requirement for fast, iterative,
cross-platform, beautiful, and easy-to-use
applications.
This is a major shift in emphasis and
opportunity. Looking back to see what
­ for databases was amongst a growing list of
has happened since the digital revolution
­began and what has changed will provide
vital background and context and reveal
the scope of what is on offer here.
This offering has very important
­connections to the development of d ­ igital
Quality Management Systems (QMSs) and
picks up on tools and opportunities that
were largely stripped out over time from
the software we used to develop early
QMSs. But to understand the extent to
which the clock is being beneficially turned
back, we also need to look at what has
changed for the good in the ­intervening
period and reframe this apparently new,
but also very original, shift in emphasis
and opportunity.
Digital Revolution Beginnings
The Advent of the Business Micro
There are important echoes of the ­opportunities
that came with the advent of the business
micro, very important c ­ onnections, and
­significant and vital differences that this
article explores.
2 © Business Expert Press 978-1-94709-813-8 (2018)
www.businessexpertpress.com
Figure 2a: Early Word Processor
Figure 2b: Early Database Software for
Business Microcomputers
“I remember it well”! Using the first
spreadsheets and databases was a heady
freedom from extremely limited corporate
resource I first used. Ones that were still
not that far from the beginnings of ICL
(the early UK competitor to IBM) in the
management of Lyons Tea Houses core
business. I wrote my first paper tape pro-
grams for an English Electric Leo Marconi
in K-autocode!
“Supercalc” for spreadsheets and “dBASE”
early software that I first used some 10–15
years later and these classes of local back
office programs enabled digitization of
­record keeping, which is still proceeding
apace today.
DOS to Windows
Windows opened the WYSIWYG (What
You See Is What You Get) world of seeing
on screen as you worked what you were
also going to see when the document was
printed off. This has now matured into
portable document formats such as Adobe
Reader that are guaranteed to reproduce
faithfully in widely diverse computer
environments.
Office Software
Standardization of software enabled defi-
nition of the main office software suite of
Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presenta-
tion, Database, and email client. But early
on it was clear that other software needs
would soon emerge, and early appearances
of Project Management and Diagramming
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 Building a Quality System in Office 365
software matured into the important office
companion tools we know and love today!
It is important to remember that
these early programs, particularly the
Lotus suite of programs and dBase II to
give some ­ examples, had very powerful
programming facilities that today have
­ language for extracting and manipulating
­migrated into the domain of programmers
as Visual ­Basic—which is anything but ba-
sic for most ­current power users and cit-
izen developers to use and into a whole
range of languages far more powerful than
the Fortran, Algol, C
­ obol, Pascal, and oth-
ers that early adopters and users had to
master.
Hypertext, Hyperlinking,
and the Internet
As document creation and management
­developed, so did the need to link i­ nformation
in a nonlinear manner and enable branch-
ing within and between ­documents for ease
of use and to add value. So ­hypertext and
hyperlinks emerged and revolutionized use
of documents in Word Processing, Presenta-
tion, and Spreadsheet Software.
The internet developed from this c­ oncept.
In 1989, Berners-Lee proposed a “­distributed
hypertext system” for the “management of
general information . . . at CERN” [Berners-Lee
1989]. The exchange of data in this proposed
system was based on an interchange format
very similar to an SGML [ISO 1986] applica-
tion. This ­interchange format had explicit
representations of hypertext links and was
to be used in conjunction with a protocol for
addressing and requesting documents over
a large network.
Key Developments on the Way
Databases and How to Query Them
Databases developed massively outside the
scope of office software and, although the
offerings were used so effectively in early
QMSs and were good for safe use on small
office networks, but for wider use they
were completely insecure and generally
lacked facilities for recovery and rollback
when needed.
© Business Expert Press 978-1-94709-813-8 (2018)
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We now have a computing world that is
dominated by very powerful proprietary and
open source database servers operating in a
range of widely diverse proprietary and open
source operating systems. The common
­feature they generally all share is a common
data—Standard Query Language (SQL).
Principles of data design and easy and
safe use of query language have been
­simplified greatly since the early days of
office software and the offerings on Office
365 reflect this.
SharePoint and Software as a Service
SharePoint had several starting points and
one was as a means of rapid ­development
of team websites for a company ­network.
­Another was easy file and ­document ­sharing.
SharePoint combined “network administration
actions with the email, c­ alendaring, contacts,
and to-do list ­technology ­contained within
Exchange.”2 It developed into shared ­document
­management and indexing a ­ pplications
and is at the heart of Office 365. The most
recent development is “Hybrid SharePoint
Environments” providing the flexibility of
using SharePoint in both a local server and
­cloud-based setting. SharePoint lists e­ nable
the presentation of columns and rows of
­table data and interfaces with databases.3
Process Management
In parallel with the development of Qual-
ity Software, the process model became
more central and much business system
2 
History of SharePoint: The Past, Present
and Future, Karim Roumani, https://www
.­portalfronthosting.com/blog/history-of-share-
point-the-past-present-and-future.pdf.
3 
SharePoint lists I: An introduction, https://
support.office.com/en-gb/article/SharePoint-
lists-I-An-introduction-f11cd5fe-bc87-4f9e-9bfe-
bbd87a22a194.
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