With a new marketing term—Office Business Applications (OBAs)—Microsoft is making a renewed effort toward a long-time goal: transforming Office from a suite of desktop productivity applications into a front end for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other mission-critical applications. Although OBA doesn't include any new technology, it signals that Microsoft has finally chosen some winners from among the many competing and overlapping technologies it has used to promote Office-based development over the past six years.

The What and Why of OBAs

An OBA is an application that uses one or more parts of the "Office System" (which includes the Office suite as well as server applications such as SharePoint Server) as the user interface for a critical business application. In some cases, an OBA may integrate with client applications, most often Outlook or Excel. For example, Duet, Microsoft's joint product with SAP, enables end-users to enter billable hours directly in their Outlook calendars. In other cases, an OBA might use SharePoint Server's Business Data Catalog (BDC) and workflow features to automate tasks involving a business application, such as processing a loan application.

For customers, OBAs could help employees make better decisions by improving their access to business data contained in ERP and other line-of-business systems. For Microsoft, OBAs could increase deployments of newer versions of Office, increase sales of the additional Client Access Licenses (CALs) required to access many SharePoint Server features, and make Office harder to replace with lower-cost alternatives such as Open Office. ISVs could increase revenue from their applications by selling higher-cost CALs for accessing their applications through an OBA instead of lower-cost CALs associated with accessing their applications through a Web browser.

However, IT managers will need to weigh the benefits of OBAs against the costs of additional software licenses and CALs, as well as additional development expenses.

A Roadmap Emerges

Microsoft's new OBA marketing program includes QuickStart kits for developers who want to build OBAs. It also has a number of Reference Application Packs (RAPs) that show how OBAs are intended to work and provide code that customers can use or modify. Microsoft is spending up to US$10 million dollars to provide sales and marketing assistance to partners through a new OBA OnRamp program.

More importantly, Microsoft is finally beginning to make clear how developers should build OBAs by indicating which OBA technologies will be enhanced and improved and which will be left behind.

Convincing corporate developers to use Office as a front end for critical business applications has been something of a Holy Grail for Microsoft, so many different groups at the company have developed Office application platforms, including Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), and the Information Bridge Framework (IBF). But corporate developers have been hesitant to embrace any particular technology because they fear making a bad choice and becoming stranded on a platform that Microsoft later abandons.

Microsoft is now steering OBA developers to VSTO for OBA clients and the SharePoint BDC for server integration with back-end business applications. Both technologies will continue to be developed with new features added. Competing technologies, such as the IBF, will be phased out.

By choosing strategic technologies, Microsoft will give IT decision makers more confidence that they will not have to reimplement solutions because they picked the wrong platform. However, the chosen technologies also have some drawbacks compared to some of the also-rans, which Microsoft will have to address in future releases. For example, the current version of VSTO lacks some simplified deployment features found in the IBF. The IBF works by installing a single run-time engine on every client computer. The engine is capable of hosting multiple OBA clients. Developers program the engine by writing solution metadata—effectively, a data file stored on a server and interpreted by the client-side engine. This enables administrators to push out the IBF client engine once, and then deploy any new OBA clients to a server in the form of metadata, which is a simpler process than running a client-side install for every OBA client. VSTO, in contrast, requires developers to write code in languages such as C# or VB and to install each application separately on every client, although .NET Framework features such as ClickOnce can streamline the process.

Finally, although the BDC is a strategic technology, the current version is a "v1" product. Incomplete documentation and a lack of tools make the BDC tricky to configure, and the initial version is geared toward read-only data. Updating data in an ERP system is cumbersome and not well integrated.

Future versions of VTSO and the BDC are likely to incorporate some of the deployment features of the IBF along with better tools and support for updating data in ERP systems. Microsoft uses the term "line-of-business interoperability" (LOBi) to describe these capabilities. However, LOBi will probably not appear until 2009.

Resources

The OBA OnRamp Web site is at www.obacentral.com.

The most recent version of VSTO is described in "Tools Updated for Office 2007" on page 27 of the Feb. 2007 Update.

The SharePoint BDC is explained in "Catalog Links SharePoint Server to Business Data" on page 15 of the May 2007 Update.

Duet is described in "Duet Delivers Office Client for SAP" on page 27 of the July 2006 Update.