Office Business Applications are a new breed of application that help businesses unlock the value of their line-of-business (LOB) systems and turn document-based processes into real applications. OBAs leverage the client, server, services and technologies of the 2007 Microsoft Office system to solve business problems. Applications and documents can be extended to add enterprise-specific features, and LOB systems can be seamlessly integrated with the Microsoft Office system to make the LOB system much more accessible.

Office Business Applications are appropriate for a variety of situations, especially those involving integration with line-of-business systems.

Perhaps you are a typical company that has invested millions of dollars in enterprise software but have been left frustrated by the fact only a small percentage of your users are fully able to make use of the data locked away in the line-of-business (LOB) systems. Or perhaps your company is like so many other companies where the majority of your work happens in Office Outlook or Office Excel and isn’t captured in your formal, LOB systems, and doesn’t make use of the LOB data you’ve been capturing. In these and similar situations, it makes perfect sense to leverage the possibilities afforded by Office Business Applications.

There are customers building OBAs today using Office 2003, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) to extract more value out of their existing applications. While you can use current-generation technologies, the client and server capabilities of the 2007 Microsoft Office system for both the OBA developer and the corporate user make it a much richer platform for building OBAs.

Absolutely. OBAs will integrate with any back-end process or service and are indifferent to whether services are running locally (on premise) or remotely (hosted).

Services facilitate the accessibility of business processes and OBAs facilitate the presentation of such services to the people that must interact with them. As a result, OBAs and services are complementary technologies that reinforce the value of the other.

Consider the following simple examples:

• A financial group may generate earnings reports by exporting year-to-date and quarterly figures, charting in Office Excel, then embedding into a Word document. OBAs make it possible to connect to the accounting systems to retrieve data, to invoke business logic created within an Excel spreadsheet, and to generate the report — all directly from Office Word.
• A sales group may generate proposals using the customer database, confidential algorithms for determining pricing, and passing the document between various departments for approvals. That information may, in turn, be fed into an Excel spreadsheet, and then embedded into a Word document to create a final document to deliver to the customer. OBAs can automate the backend connections and computations, and route the document throughout the company for appropriate reviews.

The term "composite application" has been so widely applied that it is becoming meaningless. The definition is used almost exclusively in the context of transactional systems which are severely limited in scope compared to the broader scope of an OBA. OBAs support people in the efficient completion of business activities by bringing together other people, documents, and the transactional information that acts as inputs. An OBA could be considered to be a composite application, but this association adds no value in understanding the benefits of an OBA. Secondly, although composite applications are touted for the flexibility they afford, this flexibility is really only available to the developer. Once delivered, composite applications are no different than their monolithic forebears and continue to attempt to dictate user behavior. OBAs, by their very nature, are oriented towards supporting the flexibility required by their users and ensuring that the line-of-business systems accommodate this flexibility.

Line-of-business applications often involve a steep learning curve. Users also may need to learn multiple disparate user interfaces to access all necessary data to do their jobs. OBAs help to unify the user experience by starting with a foundation of clients such as Office Word or Office Excel, with which users are already familiar. These clients are then augmented as needed for LOB integration. Decision making is improved through real-time access to information with less room for error.

Familiarity of the Microsoft Office user interface makes it easier for users to use new applications built on the Microsoft Office platform. Purchase orders or proposal letters can be created with Office Word 2007 with less effort by retrieving live data as needed. Spreadsheet documents built with the 2007 release can be used for creating invoices or travel reports with consistency and accuracy. Instead of copying-and-pasting or exporting data, documents actually become the user interface to company data.

Starting with the 2007 Microsoft Office system and building applications on top also affords efficiency to the development effort. There is no need to reinvent common infrastructure elements (like document editing, spreadsheet analysis, data entry forms, etc.) when the Microsoft Office applications provide them as an extensible platform to build upon and customize.

The Platform is made up of the following tools and technologies:

Clients

• Microsoft Office Access 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2007

Servers

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
• Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007
• Microsoft Forms Server 2007

Services

• Excel Services
• InfoPath Forms Services

Tools

• Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)
• Visual Studio Team Suite
• Visual Studio Professional with Visual Studio Tools for 2007 Microsoft Office System (VSTO 2005 SE)
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Technologies

• Workflow
• Search
• Business Data Catalog
• Extensible UI
• Open XML File Formats
• Website and Security Framework

Yes. Download a trial.

Please visit the Microsoft Office Online Web site.

Please visit Microsoft’s OBA portal.

While Office Business Applications built on the 2007 Microsoft Office system benefit from the new user interface and expanded extensibility features, many Office Business Applications have been built on the Office 2003 system prior to the 2007 release. However, application-level customizations, Ribbon add-ins, and interaction with the new XML file formats are only available with the 2007 Microsoft Office client programs.

Macros serve to add custom actions to Microsoft Office documents using a lightweight programming environment. Office Business Applications are typically more elaborate in nature and typically involve clients, servers, and LOB integration. Office Business Applications enjoy full access to the Microsoft .NET Framework, and support either application- or document-level customizations, saved state, and deeper integration with Microsoft Office server technologies.

Visit the Office SharePoint Server 2007 home page.

While documents can be extended with access to line-of-business data independent of Office SharePoint Server, more often than not, OBAs involve Office SharePoint Server.

This is typically due to the need for collaboration capabilities. While Windows SharePoint Services provides an important element to building OBAs, Office SharePoint Server adds to these capabilities.

The chief benefit of OBAs is the integration between the clients and line-of-business servers, and the ability to tie into centrally manage the flow of documents and data between various people and systems. Thus Office SharePoint Server acts as the central hub to coordinate such activities and enforce consistency.

The Business Data Catalog (BDC) acts as a repository for descriptions of line-of-business entities and their attributes for consumption in SharePoint lists. This data can be exposed in a Web part, then embedded within a dashboard or accessed from client applications. To imagine the impact of such a system, consider how a BDC could be used to "unlock" an entity on the backend. For example, a PO, living inside of SAP, could be unlocked via BDC to flow through Search, through the portal and lists, and through to the clients, thereby making critical information easily accessible to those who need it.