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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.
I have discussed Office Business Applications (OBA) with many of my customers and partners. OBAs connect Line of Business (LOB) systems with people and processes through Microsoft Office. OBAs enable businesses to extend the Microsoft Office clients and servers into business processes running in LOB applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Supply Chain Management (SCM). This enables enterprises to create new value from existing IT investments by combining them in innovative ways.
A great starting point to learn more about OBA is OBA Central. OBA Central provides a community portal, bringing together Microsoft, Microsoft OBA ISVs, services partners and customers, enabling you to find solutions and services that address their business and technical needs. For Office Developer resources, you can learn a lot at MSDN’s Office Business Applications Developer Portal.
This Last week Microsoft held the Office Developers Conference(ODC) with Bill Gates as a key note (here is an interview with BillG after the keynote, backstage on Channel 9). One of the exciting announcements at the conference and a great example of an OBA that delivers value to customers and demonstrates a great Software + Services (“S+S”) solution is FedEx’s QuickShip application.
Read more about FedEx’s QuickShip and ODC at John Mullinax’s Beyond IT Blog, as well as Jon Box’s Out of the Box Blog.
