30 Minute Interview

Office 2007 as an application platform

Javed Sikander, Director Industry Architecture, Microsoft Corporation talks to Express Computer about the concept of Office Business Applications (OBA), how ISVs are entering into partnerships with Microsoft to create an ecosystem for Office 2007 as an application platform and the competition Redmond faces in this space.

Javed Sikander

The concept of OBA

There is a lot of complexity at the back-end creating a results gap between personal and business productivity. Our goal is to extend the power and familiarity of Office to back-end line-of-business (LOB) systems.

Conventionally companies have taken data from LOB systems and put it in Excel to analyze it and then taken the data back to the LOB system. With OBA we directly link Office clients to the LOB system.

Using SharePoint with Workflow Foundation it is easy to create an Excel report, send it to a particular user for review and then to another for approval using Workflow Foundation with SharePoint Server.

User Interface Extensibility

Developers can extend the Office 2007 User Interface (UI) and make it context-sensitive using Visual Studio tools for Office 2007. For instance, take the case of a user viewing a Purchase Order notification in Outlook. The developer can add buttons to the Ribbon UI and open a custom task pane that lets the user do stuff that would normally require you to open a LOB application.

Business Data Catalog

The Business Data Catalog (BDC) lets you model entities like customers and suppliers. You can feed the model through a Web Service or an ADO.NET connection and feed it into a Web part on the client side.

Familiarity breeds adoption

By putting the Office Ribbon UI in front of a LOB system you can drive adoption.

A lot of unstructured activities on any business process get done in Excel or Word. You can capture these activities and extend the LOB.

Partnerships

We are doing Duet with SAP. You can push data from SAP into Outlook, including real-time reports from ERP and queries from SAP NetWeaver BI.

We are also working with partners who are creating vertical-specific solutions. The source code for these sample apps is available. OBA Central is a portal for OBA related information.

What it takes

There are different levels of OBA. You can simply visualize information from the back-end system in Office clients. Or you can set up collaboration outside the back-end using SharePoint. SOA is about decomposing IT assets into sets of common services and rationalizing these. You model complete business processes as composite applications consuming services from the back-end.

Does it work with older versions of Office?

Some partners are building OBAs for Office 2003. The concept works for Office 2003 as well with Information Bridge Framework, Visual Basic for Applications and Smart Tags.

Market opportunity

Building customized applications has become easier. If you buy ERP and implement it, five years later your business has evolved and IT is busy catching up.

Competitors

There is no complete platform that matches OBA point-for-point. SharePoint would compete with Documentum or Filenet. There are EAI platforms like WebSphere and WebLogic. When it comes to client-side extensibility there is no one else. In composite applications, SAP has NetWeaver but it only supports SAP-centric applications. We have a vendor-neutral platform.

Office as a platform

Office has evolved into a platform. Our partners need to start building expertise around it. SharePoint adoption is going through the roof and you need SharePoint specific practices. Bringing the power and familiarity of Office applications is a win-win for Microsoft, our customers and partners.