With the 2007 Office System, Microsoft Office has evolved beyond a productivity suite into a unified solutions platform that makes enterprise data and processes more accessible and relevant to users. Composed of clients, servers, services, and tools, it provides a single infrastructure for communication and collaboration, business intelligence, and content management solutions. This site brings together relevant ideas, concepts, and best practices to aid architects in designing and building applications using the Microsoft Office System.
Large-scale systems such as SAP and PeopleSoft, and other comprehensive line of business (LOB) systems, are critical for the successful management of all types of business data and processes. However, not everyone in an organization has access to these systems, so the business data in them is often available to only a select few. Office Business Applications (OBAs) address this problem by using Office to bridge the divide between business data in LOB systems and the information worker.
At the Office Developer Conference today (February 11, 2008), Javed Sikander Sr. Director Platform Architecture, Microsoft announced the availability of the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit. The toolkit is available as a free download, it allows Information Workers to easily compose Office Business Applications from OBA Components such as SharePoint Web parts, content types, site pages, workflows, BDC application definitions, Visual Studio Tools for Office add-ins and Line of Business systems data sources. This toolkit is an illustration of composition capabilities of the 2007 Microsoft Office System and provides best practices and guidelines for building composite solutions.
LOB systems play a crucial role in supporting the functioning of businesses across a wide range of industries and markets. "The Results Gap" described in this paper plagues a significant majority of existing LOB system deployments. This trend will continue if solutions to bridge the gap are not implemented to unlock the value of LOB system investments across the broad spectrum of business application users.
My name is Javed Sikander. My team created reference architectures for key vertical industry scenarios (Retail, Manufacturing, Financial Services and other industries). Learn what we got about the 2007 Office System and its use as the underlying platform for the new generation business applications.
Plant Floor OBA Virtual Lab Whether you are on a slow bandwidth connection or are lazy to downlaod the OBA RAP for PF vpc, now you can see how it works using the virtual lab: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7091160
Where are all the Architects gone I have been looking to hire a good architect to lead the OBA architecture work in my team, if you know anyone who might be interested in this role which is based in Redmond, please have them ping me, here is the JD:Are you interested in driving the ... more
New year's gift - the OBA Book At the Strategic Architecture Forum (SAF) recently, we launched a new book 'Office Business Applications - Building Composite Applications Using the Microsoft Platform'. We are working on getting the content on the architecture center, but in the mea... more
2007 Office system Developr Map An updated version of the 2007 Office system developer map is live on MSDN. This is a cool all-up view of the client and server extensibility mechanisms. We’ve printed a bunch of these and will be giving them out at TechEd Developer in Barcelona an... more
OBA on C9 Brief OBA discussion on C9http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=245040#245040
ARCast.TV - Office Business Apps @ Epicor (Part 3) In this final installment with Epicor we discuss the challenges, the hard things about making this all work and take a look at a demo of the Epicor integration with Outlook 2007
ARCast.TV - Office Business Applications at Epicor (Part 2) What if you want to support multiple client front ends including office applications. How would you do it? What elements would you put in place to make it possible and what kind of problems would you ... more
OBA Composition Reference Toolkit The OBA Composition Reference Toolkit brings to surface the underlying composition capabilities of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
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