While we've previously covered both Microsoft® Office Business Applications (OBA), and Unified Communications (UC) separately, in this piece we'll address the powerful intersection between the two and what combining OBA and UC can do for enterprise level processes as well as ad hoc productivity. Integrating presence information and communication endpoints with workflows and line-of-business apps can yield new levels of collaboration by bringing you the data you need when and where you need it, and in a way that you can actually use.

A Primer on OBA
First, let's do a quick primer on OBA. It isn't a specific piece of software or platform, but rather an architecture that encompasses several server and client products, with the capacity to create custom integrated apps via a series of SDKs that work with Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 and 2008. OBA primarily builds on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Microsoft® Office® to bring Line-of-Business (LOB) apps and human processes into your everyday workflow.

For example, imagine that an account manager, Cheryl, gets a request for proposal for some hardware components. Cheryl may use a SharePoint portal to update her CRM. Custom controls on the portal page connect to Microsoft® Office Excel® data from manufacturing. She generates an Office Word® document which automatically combines this Office Excel data with the CRM data. Since Microsoft Office now uses the Open XML Office file format, she doesn't need to open Office Word or Office Excel to view or to edit documents, or even to generate them, so this step is done programmatically. Creation of the document triggers a workflow, which routes the document for sign-off. Ladd in manufacturing opens an e-mail in Microsoft Office Outlook®, where a custom task pane pulls in relevant data from the CRM, Microsoft SQL® Server, and an Excel Web Service, based on the context. This customization was created by you in Visual Studio 2008 using Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office system. Ladd checks the data and virtually signs off, which embeds a digital signature in the Office Word doc. After sign-off, the workflow routes the doc to the next person in the chain.

OBA conceptually ties all of these pieces together so that both third-party LOB apps and common internal tasks can be integrated via the familiar Microsoft Office interface. This interface can be further customized using Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office system and Visual Studio to create applications or add-ins for the various Office products.

A Primer on UC
Similar to OBA, UC as a communications architecture combines several different products. In this case, the goal is to integrate your communications into your processes and daily work via the software you use every day. This is done by leveraging Microsoft Exchange® Server, Microsoft Office Communications® Server 2007 (OCS), and Microsoft Office Communicator® 2007, as well as hardware such as VoIP-enabled phones. In other words, UC gives you a way to handle voice calls, voice mail, e-mail, IM, video, conferencing, etc, all through the same interface. Conversely, you can receive communications through the endpoint most suited to you at the moment, whether it's your cell phone or VoIP phone or IM client or e-mail client.

Figure 1. Presence Information

This "presence" information (see Figure 1) plays a key role in the UC architecture and allows developers, through the use of a variety of SDKs for server, client, and web products, to incorporate presence information into a variety of apps.

This is significant, because presence means more than simply a person's availability. Presence is key to deciding the right way to communicate, whether synchronously or asynchronously. If a person is online and available, collaborate with him or her contextually via VoIP, IM, or video. If he or she is offline or busy, extend that same collaboration into e-mail, such as by automatically including context and a link to your own presence information.

As an example, Cheryl gets a call from the client about the RFP she sent. The client needs immediate attention, but Cheryl has two big problems. She doesn't know off-hand who is the right internal contact and she doesn't even know if or where that person is available. Before UC, she may put the client on hold, look up the right person to conference, look up that person's info in the company directory, call him, miss him, leave him a message, apologize to the client, hang up, then hold up the entire process playing phone tag with all relevant parties until they can find five overlapping minutes in which to answer the client's question.

With UC, she opens Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 (OC) to find out who to talk to and how to talk to him. In this case, she discovers that Ladd is the person to pull in to the call. But because his presence information is set to "Away", she avoids wasting a call by leaving a message at his desk phone. Instead, she uses OC to initiate a three-way conference between Ladd's cell phone and the client. With UC, they're able to handle the call immediately, with minimal effort on Cheryl's part.

Seeing how UC and OBA can work independently of one another, you can probably already start to see some connection points. Following are a few potential scenarios, of varying degrees of complexity, that should give you ideas for how UC and OBA can work together to take these processes to the next level.