What is the idea behind Office Business Applications (OBA)?
The idea behind OBA is that business users are finding it difficult to get the relevant information that is stuck in their underline systems like an ERP or CRM. We believe that there is a gap between their personal productivity and innovation.
This gap comes from the fact that traditionally the line of business systems or the back-end application systems are very transactional in nature. They capture the business but in a very hardcore way. There is no flexibility of business rules and there is no flexibility in evolving the existing systems.
While the businesses keep evolving because of the changing landscape, the IT systems always lag behind the business. As a result, instead of providing a strategic differentiation to the business, these IT systems hold the business behind.
This happens because of the various ways these systems were designed. We call this gap between business and personal productivity the result gap.
OBA is a new breed of applications that bridges this result gap. OBA will unlock the value of back-end systems by bringing the power and familiarity of Office to end users.

How will OBA help CIOs and other users to get the value of the line of business?
OBA brings the line of business and the back-end applications together. Very often in the business world we see that people do the transactions in the backend systems. Thus, if a purchase order (PO) needs to be created, the user goes to the SAP or ERP system and creates it. However, when the user has to take an important business decision or analyze a function, he has to move that data from the back-end system into Excel.
Now imagine that many POs are collected in a week and placed in Excel to gauge the performance of various functions. Post-analysis, certain decisions made could be ad hoc and the results are pushed back in the back-end systems. This is a two-step process.
OBA removes this two-step process. It says, let’s integrate the Office front-end with the business platform. By doing this it unlocks the value of the line of business.
One of the things that CIOs struggle with is that they buy a huge ERP system and implement it—but the users are not really using the system. Though the users get trained it is difficult for them to find where the data is and how to get to certain processes. The value for the CIOs is that they can get their users up on the system by using all the information in the context of an Office system.
Another way to look at it is that you have a typical business process like a CRM process. Normally what happens is that the CRM system captures the typical business process from creating a lead to completing a sale. But in every step of this process the business activity is never captured in the system. Some exceptions happen—like users know how to deal with the costing of the solution, estimating the design, validation, etc. But all these activities are unstructured.
If you realize, these processes happen in the Office world. We want to build systems that will capture this unstructured activity on top of the line of business systems.
We have been doing some of this work with SAP in the form of Duet. For the first version of Duet we targeted time-reporting, so if you are doing a project and have to report time you can do it using an Office interface instead of using a SAP interface.
Similarly for Dynamics, which is our own ERP system for SMB companies; we have built dynamic snap-ins where you bring the office interface to certain Dynamic processes.

Could you throw some light on the ongoing work and technologies that have been put to use in developing OBAs?
There are lots of ISVs and partners building OBAs to bridge the result gap. If you look at any OBA system, we build the tools and the platform, our solutions partners like SAP, Oracle and others build the solutions, and services partners provide the services.
The Office system has evolved from a set of clients to essentially clients, servers and tools in a complete application platform. When we thought of Office the tools that came to mind were Word and Excel. But with the 2007 Office system we have launched a complete set of servers like the Microsoft Office SharePoint (MOS) server which includes the Office form servers and also technologies like workflow. SharePoint is like a document management system.
MOS helps to model the document flow easily. Users can create a process so that when a document enters it goes to the SharePoint library, then sends it to concerned person/s for approval, and finally decides whether it needs to be archived or needs further modification.
Similarly, there is a process called business data catalog (BDC) in MOS that allows access of data from the line of business systems. BDC acts as a technology that brings data from the back-end system into our Office clients.
Also, we are using the Open XML file format for our Office 2007 systems; we have opened up our file format for all these documents. This file format makes it easy for developers to manipulate Office documents.
The third feature is user interface (UI) extensibility. The Office UI extensibility is a key feature of our business application story. The idea here is that using the Office UI customers can bring in their own customization. For example, you could easily add new buttons to the Office ribbon, and open custom task panes or custom form regions in Outlook.
We have created some sample applications around certain industry processes that we have put up on the Microsoft developer network. Here we have launched many sample applications and provided the source codes for our customers/partners to take, extend and build on these applications.
We have also launched OBACentral, a portal where customers can come in to look for particular functions like HR. It is more like a matching service for customers and partners.
At present we have 220+ partners. In another six months we will have around 1,000 partners and we will list all the business applications that they have built. The customers can come on the portal and look for their specific applications and contact the partners.
Secondly, Office has evolved into a complete application platform. People can build applications using this underlying technology in Office.
We are seeing a huge amount of momentum around the world. Locally, there is considerable interest among banks, capital markets and manufacturing companies.
The workloads however are different. Sometimes the workloads are more around collaboration, sometimes around business intelligence, sometimes around document management and enterprise content management. But across these three or four workloads we are seeing a great deal of interest all across the globe in the concept of OBA.

How will the OBA solutions be integrated with the Office System platform?
For the Office platform, Office is used as the client and the developers use Visual Studio tools to create the package to create these OBAs, so the integration with Office is easy. We have a well-defined application programming interface (API), and these are well exposed in the Visual Studio tools for Office. We are also launching Visual Studio 2008, codenamed Orcas, which will have more support for building these OBAs.

A developer or ISV could deploy OBAs on a Vista/Office 2007 platform. There are other deployment options like XP and Office 2003 as well. So will building of OBAs on different platforms lead to varying user experiences?
Office 2003 has a different user interface when compared with Office 2007. With 2007 we introduced custom task panes, form regions for Outlook 2007, and other concepts.
The OBAs can be built with both Windows 2003 and Windows XP. The whole concept is to bring the power of Office to the business systems. However, with Office 2007 we have a better user experience; we have partners who are working on both these systems.
You will see OBAs built for Office 2003 which will run on XP, OBAs built on Office 2007 running on XP, and also Office 2007 running on Vista using the Windows Presentation Foundation.
There will be a better user experience with Office 2007 as it is more context-aware.
How does an Office application in 2003 work? You have an add-in which goes inside Word, and that add-in is then a part of the Office whenever you open it.
In 2007 there is a change. First of all the ribbon is a contextual UI paradigm in itself. You click on a picture and the ribbon changes. In Office 2007 the code need not be application level at all—it could be a part of your document. The document then has metadata which is embedded inside custom XML parts based on which the ribbon UI will change, hence the context of things come automatically. If you are used to working in Office 2007 and you click on an object that is not known to Office natively but is coming from your application, the ribbon changes. But as an Office user the experience is just the same for you.

Any products lined up from Microsoft similar to Duet or Snap-ins for other ERPs?
Currently we have around 150 ISVs all over the globe who are building OBAs. You will see more products come out from us, or there will be partners who will launch such products on their own.
We have work going on with Dassault Systèmes, an ISV for product life-cycle management that focuses on manufacturing companies like Boeing. Dassault is betting high on OBA. They have built OBAs for Boeing’s service personnel. Service personnel assigned the job of fixing parts on an aircraft can get 3D images of the CAD drawings of that particular assembly.
From Microsoft, users can watch out for LOBi (Line of business interoperability). LOBi will enable deep structured process integration with Office client applications, update transactional applications from within Microsoft Office, and offer the ability to take structured business processes and data offline.
Similarly, in the BizTalk R2, we will be launching Windows Communications Foundations (WCF)-based adapters which are a set of adapters to some familiar line of business systems like SAP, Oracle and others.
Here we will have an adapter framework that will be shipped as part of the WCF in the BizTalk product line which will make it easy for integration with the back-end systems.
Also, with the Office 14 timeframe, we plan to ship more innovation that will take the OBA concept to the next step.