OBA Mashups!

The 2007 Microsoft Office system is a powerful platform for building role-based, collaborative, and analytical applications that extend the reach of line-of-business systems and back-end applications to information workers across an organization. Office Business Applications (OBAs) is the general term used to describe solutions that integrate the core capabilities of backend business systems with the widely deployed and used business productivity services and applications that constitute the Microsoft Office System. OBAs provide line-of-business data, information, and processes to information workers directly within the business productivity tools, interfaces, and devices that they use to execute and complete their business tasks.

The OBA Composition Reference Toolkit reveals the underlying composition capabilities of the Microsoft Office system. It integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft Office system to enable a prescriptive, application-composition experience for information workers. These information workers can then go on to build and deploy OBAs by using semantically related OBA components such as workflows; document libraries, lists, and pages in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; Web parts; client add-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO); business intelligence (BI) reports; BI dashboards; and so on. The Toolkit contains a Microsoft OBA Composition Server and an OBA Composer. The OBA Composition Server includes metadata, administration, and provisioning services to enable cataloging of OBA components, administering and managing components, defining semantic relationships between components, defining the bindings between components and line-of-business systems, and to support the deployment of OBAs that users have composed by using the components. The OBA Composer is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that consumes and uses the services of the OBA Composition Server to enable a rich client and prescriptive user experience for composing and deploying OBAs. The Administration user interface for the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit is integrated into the Central Administration portal of Office SharePoint 2007.

I will be a speaker during TechReady7 (Technical event for Microsoft Employees) in Seattle and I will talk about Dynamics + OBA + Composition to explain how to design a Business Applications for our Customers.

I will post something about it in August.

If you would like to undestand better the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit, see this interview to Javed Sikander, Microsoft ?Platform Architecture Director.

Keep in touch!

-roberto