One of the very exciting and cool things I failed to mention in my OBA and ODC News post was the release and announcement regarding the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit.  This toolkit empowers developers, and more specifically, advanced information workers to compose and build Office Business Applications.

The OBA Composer, which is part of the downloadable toolkit, is a very cool WYSIYG designer tool built in WPF.  It consumes and uses the services of the OBA Composition Server to enable a rich client and prescriptive user experience for composing and deploying OBAs.  Here is a screen shot.

OBA Composition Reference Toolkit

The OBA Composition Reference Toolkit brings to surface the underlying composition capabilities of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. It integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft Office 2007 System to enable a prescriptive application composition experience for Information Workers to build and deploy Office Business Applications (OBAs) using semantically related OBA Components like Workflows, SharePoint document libraries and lists, SharePoint Pages, Web Parts, VSTO Office Client Add-ins, BI Reports, BI Dashboards etc. The  toolkit comprises an OBA Composition Server and an OBA Composer. The OBA Composition Server implements metadata and provisioning services to enable cataloging OBA components, defining semantic relationships between components, defining the bindings between components and LOB systems, and to support deploying OBAs composed by users.