Tools You Can Use
You've seen several examples of what an OBA can do for your organization. Now what does it take for you, the developer, to make all this happen? To help you understand how to build solutions that fit into the OBA architecture, consider Duet. Jointly developed by Microsoft and SAP, Duet allows SAP to be integrated into Microsoft Office Systems, bridging Microsoft Office users to SAP's business management software, while allowing the knowledge from the workflow of Microsoft Office documents to be captured and used as part of normal business practices. But you'll need a few tools to get started, including the following.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System
As mentioned earlier, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System is the big one for developers. You can create custom Microsoft Office apps using a Visual Studio® SDK—look for "Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office SE." Previous versions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System have allowed you to build Microsoft Office apps in a way that VBA and macros can't touch. With the SE version for Microsoft Office 2007, you can use Visual Studio to create custom ribbons, buttons, and task panes, as well as integrate an Microsoft Office UI with common libraries and Web services used elsewhere in your systems, all using a rich Microsoft Office object model.

How it Fits
Consider a price management application that integrates SAP with Microsoft Office. Use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System to build a custom Excel app that pulls in SAP data. Perhaps you previously used a combination of BizTalk and XI to cache that data. In this scenario, the business user engages with a more familiar Excel interface.

Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007
With SharePoint Designer 2007, you can create workflows based on a UI similar to defining rules in Microsoft Outlook. In other words, if this condition is met, take that action, etc. Use workflows to define specific pieces of the business process, and then integrate them into the larger business application. Unlike Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System, Office SharePoint Designer 2007 can be used by non-technical business groups. So a financial analyst can create a spreadsheet defining a new financial product, for example. And the spreadsheet acts not only as a self-contained product, but also as a "recipe" for the business logic itself, which can then be integrated into a larger process. In this way, non-technical workers familiar with Microsoft Office can lighten the IT load by creating functional components, while IT still maintains control over the overall system and can integrate uniformly created components as necessary. See the Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Overview for more information.

How it Fits
Throughout your OBA, information needs to be routed to the right people at the right time. In an SAP-based app, for example, Office SharePoint Server 2007 would see the new quotes created with the help of your Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System app and notify management for approval. You've used Office SharePoint Server 2007 and its Forms Services to create a simple web interface, or perhaps you've built a Microsoft Office Outlook (2003 and 2007) Add-In, again using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Either way, the quote goes back into SAP via BizTalk, again routed by your workflow.

Where to Go From Here
These are bare-boned basics. But OBA represents a big initiative, with a lot of intricate components working together and affords the organization the opportunity to not only integrate business process and practice but to also leverage the knowledge of all workers in the organization through a standard interface—Microsoft Office.

To dive a little deeper into OBA, here are some additional resources:

• OBA Team Blog
• Innovate on Office
• Office Business Developer Application Portal
• The 2007 Microsoft Office System and Other Platform Technologies for Building Composite Applications
• Javed Sikander: Office 2007—Office Business Application
• OBA Reference Application Pack for Supply Chain Management
• OBA Reference Application Pack for Loan Origination
• The O₂ OBA Challenge
• Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP
• OBA Central
• Javed Sikander's Blog
• Mike Walker's Blog
• Patrick Tisseghem's Blog on OBA and MOSS
• So Why Bother with This "OBA" Thing? (from the OBA Team Blog)
• What Is OBA All About? (from Tisseghem's Blog)
• ISV/Software Solutions Competency (Microsoft Partner account required)

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