The World of Office Business Applications (OBA’s) – Part 1

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!