Push for Office-Based Development Continues

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.