At the 2006 Microsoft Developer's Conference, Bill Gates announced a new class of applications that foster greater collaboration, content management, data integration, and integration with Line of Business (LOB) apps. These applications, built on the Microsoft Office System, bring the power and familiarity of Microsoft Office to more users while combining document management with collaboration using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

In the year since this announcement, Microsoft has christened this architecture "OBA" or Office Business Application, and has released various examples on what these OBAs look like and how to build them. But what is OBA, exactly? And how do ISVs build this new type of integrated application?

Here, you'll cut through the marketing-speak and get down to basics. You'll get an overview of OBA, learn its six core technologies, and find out just what developers and ISVs need in order to start building something useful.

What Is OBA?
Office Business Applications can be defined as a class of applications that connect Line of Business systems with the people who use them everyday. Knowledge workers, such as buyers and sellers, managers, even those from accounting to sales, all typically use a variety of custom or off-the-shelf LOB apps such as CRM or ERP to accomplish their daily tasks. At the same time, over 400 million people worldwide use Microsoft Office applications. With OBA, you have a type of application built on tools and services that integrate with LOB applications, extending them to the more familiar Microsoft Office Clients.

Of course, this definition barely scratches the surface of OBA’s potential. Think about a typical business process, such as bidding on a supply contract. A couple of core functions, such as receiving the RFP and submitting a proposal, may be handled by your LOB application. But surrounding those functions, you have numerous unstructured processes, like looking up inventory, calculating margins, routing the RFP to legal, routing it to accounting, all tasks that are usually done with Microsoft Office.

Enter Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers several services, with functionality that extends beyond SharePoint and allows you to integrate other applications, such as Workflows and Business Data Catalogs. Using a variety of SharePoint services and custom Microsoft Office applications (preferably the 2007 Office release, though the 2003 Office release can also be used), you can build custom solutions that capture all of these unstructured processes and bring structure to them by extending your LOB system into the world of Microsoft Office. Each of these processes is mapped to familiar Microsoft Office applications.

For example, if the RFP comes in through Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003 or 2007 release, then a custom Outlook Add-in recognizes what it is and automatically brings up relevant data in a Task Pane, giving you access to inventory and pricing without switching apps. A Microsoft® Office Excel® Web Service performs necessary calculations behind the scenes and displays the results (without ever opening Excel). When you're done, you generate a Microsoft Office Word document (without ever opening Microsoft Office Word, which gets uploaded to SharePoint. E-mails go out to all necessary parties, who view the Microsoft Office Word doc alongside data relevant to them, based on a role-based security framework. When their approvals are captured, the process continues along a path described in a Workflow attached to this document, alerting the relevant parties who update common data stores and continue the process until a completed proposal has been finalized and submitted to the client. After that, you can monitor status through SharePoint while the document itself remains accessible through new, more powerful, search tools, for reference when the next RFP like it comes through.

In summary, the Microsoft Office system, including Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint, provides a platform. Combining LOB apps with that platform produces an OBA.

As you can see, OBA isn't a single application or an application suite, but rather a collection of technologies and services applied towards both structured and unstructured business processes. That said, six key services, some from SharePoint Server 2007 and some, part of the Microsoft Office platform, play an essential role in the solutions that make up the technology components of OBA.

Workflows in Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint Services
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes native support for Microsoft® Windows® Workflow Foundation. Windows SharePoint Services workflows can be associated with SharePoint documents and libraries. With workflows, entire management processes can be attached to documents or libraries, triggered when the document is created, edited, approved, etc. Workflows give developers, and even non-technical employees, the ability to model business processes that extend into the unstructured world.

For more information:

• Introduction to Workflows in Windows SharePoint Services
• Wrangling SharePoint Workflows with Visual Studio
• MSDN Webcast: Developing SharePoint Workflows Using Visual Studio 2005 (Level 200)

Business Data Catalog
The Business Data Catalog (BDC), also part of SharePoint Server 2007, lets you create metadata models that make business data available to other applications without coding. By creating application definitions, you can index back-end server data from Web Services or databases, and then feed client assets like Web parts, custom search functions, spreadsheets, word docs, and other SharePoint Server 2007 app components.

For more information:

• Overview of Business Data Catalog
• Business Data Catalog FAQ
• MSDN Webcast: Office SharePoint Server 2007 Business Data Catalog (Part 1 of 2): Integrating Line-of-Business Data and Applications into Your Enterprise Portal (Level 200)