See also the first part of the series:

• 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!