• Part 1 – Introduction

In our everyday work we all use several Line-of-Business systems as well as all of us know well the Office client applications. Although the integration between them is not too common yet, I’d like to show you the advantaged and disadvantages, pros and cons of the integration, and give some useful tips and tricks if you decide to make some OBAs.

In the first part I was introducing you, what the OBA (Office Business Application) means, what parts and components can you build them from, and what are the basics of an OBA building. In the second part we’ll see the scenario about the full demo what is going to built in the following parts.

Background

Nowadays the expression “Software + Services (S+S)” is very-very fashionable as well as important and promising. Few weeks ago the basic topic of the PDC 20008 was the cloud computing, Azure and related things. My current articles are not about them (although they are very-very interesting and exciting things and we should be very happy to be the part of that story), but I can’t avoid this.

So, of course you can have your own, on-premise softwares as you need them. Nowadays you can buy them as services yet (Software as a Service – SaaS). These services are hosted somewhere in the cloud, in huge data centers – but doesn’t matter where and how, you simply get capacity, scalability, maintenance, etc. as you need, and you don’t have to have resources on your side anymore.

If you would like Software + Services, all together, you have to plan carefully what you should have on-premise (for example client applications), and what you can (or should) place to the cloud.Basically you have a third option too: you can give your applications and services to a hoster, which is a way between on-premise and cloud services. From my view logically this is almost the same as you host them (outsides of the walls of your office), so I’ll talk about a real, very clear S+S architecture in the followings.

Of course, my focus is based on Office Business Applications. First of all, let’s see what does S+S mean in the OBA world. The Software side is very simple: you have your Office clients on the client computers in the offices, and/or you have SharePoint on the server-side. But the SharePoint not only have User Interface and client services to the users: it has some Services as well, so it can be on the both sides in the same time. For example, these services can be the Enterprise Search, LOB system integration, Content Management, etc. which are accessible by the SharePoint UI, Office clients and other (even custom) applications as well.

The Story

In the followings I’m building a very simple application based on the idea that we have a company what has a typical architecture with a lot of separated LOB (Line of Business) systems, huge amount of connections and interfaces between them (like a spider web), as you can see on the following picture. The end-users access these systems mostly via dedicated clients.

Because of several reasons, this company decides to make a very new structure to their architecture, and divide their LOB Systems (with data and processes) to two groups: the first group is located on-premise afterwards, but the others going to the cloud (as services). The second important issue is the question integration: what systems should be integrated with each other, and which ones have to be separated?

Basically, the integration decision might seem to be technical issue, but actually this is a business one. During the planning of this architecture, you have to answer a ton of questions:

• Do you want to build architecture with collaborative systems, or need independent applications?
• What kind of collaborations do you need in your company?
• Do you have/ need solution-oriented or task-oriented systems?
• What is your primary goal: to have set of systems with well-defined, global responsibilities, or separated applications with separated responsibilities?
• How important are scalability, maintainability, robustness etc. to you?
• etc.

Well, our company has decided GO! – so let’s see what functionalities do we need, and what the first steps are during implementation.

Functionality

Our company needs a complex document management system, with SharePoint-contents, custom Office extensions, and some data coming from the cloud. The following picture shows the basic architecture of the system:

So, from the client side you can see two kind of User Interfaces: your Office 2007 applications (Word) with OBA addins, and MOSS sites with custom contents. These contents come from not only MOSS itself, but from SQL Data Services and SQL Server Reporting Services as well. On the following pictures I show you, what the users can see in their Word 2007, and on a MOSS page:

Of course, to make your system do things like these, you have to configure and develop a lot. But don’t worry, it’s much more easier, and much more beautiful that you’re expecting, believe me! In the following parts I’ll show you the following steps to make your own Service-based OBA:

Part 3. Client side – Office 2007 add-ins
Part 4. SharePoint – The server
Part 5. SharePoint – Business Data (LOB Systems)
Part 6. SQL Data Services – My favourite LOB System
Part 7. Conclusions

Stay tuned, next parts are coming soon!

Welcome to my seven-part series about Office Business Applications (OBAs). In these articles I want to show you the world of OBAs, which is my favorite topic I’ve ever worked with.

I’m going to do this by introducing you through the whole process, and I’ll build up a demo for you with lots of examples.

Introduction: What are Office Business Applications?

All of us know well the Office client applications, and all of us use them in everyday work. Word, Outlook, Excel, etc. are our friends – isn’t it? J

Although we use several Line-of-Businesses as well, it is not too common to integrate them with our Office clients. Instead of that, we use separated applications to manage our LOB data. Why? – Maybe because the integration is not an easy way: you have to understand all aspects of this complicated world:

• the customer’s business needs;
• deep architectural aspects of all technologies and systems using (LOB Systems as SAP, Oracle, etc., MOSS, clients, interfaces, connections, etc.);
• development aspects of the solution (MOSS, VSTO, etc. development).

Although Office Business Applications can connect these LOB Systems with the everyday users by the familiar user interface of Office applications, it’s not too easy. In my articles I’d like to give you some tricks, some best practices answering these questions.

To clarify what I’d like to talk about, let’s start with a simple example. Probably you generate a lot of document in the course of your everyday work: for example specifications, training materials, contracts, etc. Do you know, what is the most common way to generate these documents? – Yes, the magic copy-paste. Not too comfortable, but easy to use.

Instead of that way, open a new, empty document in your Word 2007. What you can see here is the document (of course), the ribbon and the task pane:

Office 2007 contains a lot of new opportunities to extend the default behavior, and to give much more easier way to develop our custom extensions. What you can do in Office 2007 clients, are the followings:

• create custom Task Pane
• create custom Ribbon
• extend built-in fuctions
• customize user interface
• use property fields inside the Open XML document

These opportunities are open for you and you’re free to do anything with them. Could you imagine what does it mean? Let’s see…

OBA as an Office AddIn++

Right now you know what an Office AddIn can be like, and you have your LOB Systems as well – so you’re ready to start to connect them! As the following picture shows, OBAs (Office Business Application) are in the intersection of Microsoft Office System and Line-of-Business applications.

The OBAs can be built from several components – similar like LEGO blocks. These components (LEGO pieces) can be several kinds:

• Presentation:
  • Office Clients
  • Forms Services
  • SharePoint Portals
  • SharePoint Web Parts
• Productivity:
  • Content Types
  • Human Workflows
  • Business Alerts and Notifications
  • Content and Information Management Policies
• Business Domain Services:
  • BDC
  • Business Intelligence (Excel Services, SQL Reporting Services, etc.)
  • Enterprise Search
  • BPM (Workflow Activities, Workflows, Biztalk Orchestrations)

Behind these components, there is the Office Business Platform. In the following parts of this series we’ll see how to use this platform, how to develop your custom components, and how to deploy them. I’ll show you some LOB Systems examples and really useful tools, and of yours a lot of best practices, tricks and ideas.

So join me and let’s put together the building blocks!