Architects Rule!

Overall Key Messages The need for organizations to provide richer, more connected solutions to their customers is crystal clear, but complexity, time-to-market and cost have historically been barriers to deployment. Microsoft is breaking down these barriers...

The OBA/VSTO Starter Kit v. 1.0 provides information on how developers can build a Client and LOB system Integration OBA using Office 2007, VSTO & SAP. It’s a great introduction to how developers can use VSTO to integrate LOB systems into the context...

As we know WF and Biztalk are related and both have their strenghts and weaknesses: Windows Workflow Foundation provides a new programming model that developers can use for declaratively creating business logic in software. BizTalk Server provides...

OBA Central was launched last week with great success: the site has had 170,000 hits in this first week. This is a community of partners developing interesting Office Business Applications across industries and horizontal scenarios. Customers can search...

Summary On July 11th, Forrester released its Application Server Platforms Wave. Forrester defines an application server platform as “infrastructure software for building Web and composite applications and, increasingly, applications based on service...

Interesting whitepaper about S+S . It provides a summary of the S+S strategy and explains the impact and opportunity for our large partner base - both VARs who traditionally make money from on-premise installs + maintenance and ISVs who traditionally...

Microsoft announced that BizTalk Server 2006 R2 will ship in September. In the B2B area it offers key new features like: RFID EDI support (i.e. much improved) Availability Statement 2 (AS2) support Prebuilt integration with SharePoint...

Microsoft CRM team announces Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM at the Worldwide Partner Conference 2007 in Denver this week. This offering is again a great illustration of the main architectural patterns advocated by MS: OBA : the knowledge worker...

Microsoft is in the early stages of a plan that will see virtually its entire lineup of underlying Internet services opened up to developers. Some extracts out of the covering CNET article: Quote : "In addition to making available its existing...

The Business Data Catalog (BDC - a feature of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition MOSS2007) plays a crucial role in the OBA architecture pattern: it exposes the data of LOB applications as business entities. Those business entities...

At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in Denver, CO, Microsoft announced the OBA OnRamp program for partners that will invest as much as $10 million in the form of technical resources, training and assistance, and marketing around partner OBAs...

Interesting (and IMO very true, sadly enough ) quote from the full article (view from CBR): "Recent Computer Business Review stories about enterprise architecture vendors like Telelogic and Troux Technologies have seen how vendors are trying...

At the Worldwide Parter Conference 2007 MS announced yesterday that Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 will launch together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27 2008. Check it out at: WPC2007 announcement

As you might know via ADO.NET 3.5 MS is shipping the Entity Data Model (EDM). This model is heavily influenced by the entity/relationship idiom, incorporates entity inheritance, and may be mapped to both relational and programming language concepts. You...

As seen on Mike Walker's (Enterprise Architect at MS Corp) blog. Yet another framework is moving to an Enterprise Architecture style. It is not (yet?) 100% complete (and in this it is no different then other EA framework) but as could be expected it...

You have career aspirations to become an architect and wonder how to get there? You are wondering what architects in IT organizations are responsible for? You are wondering how to foster some of your people to become architects? Microsoft has started...

As a result of trade press meetings conducted throughout the week, momentum is building up around OBA. Coverage has focused on the real world business results companies are seeing as a result of OBAs with either Skanska or Epicor referenced or quoted...

The OBA Reference Application Pack for E-forms processing in the public sector was released on MSDN today. Work on this RAP commenced in May 2007 and culminated last Friday with this release to the web. This RAP contains a reference solution architecture...

The OBA Reference Application Pack for Manufacturing Plant Floor Analytics was released on MSDN today. Work on this RAP commenced in mid-May 2007 and culminated last Friday with this release to the web. This RAP contains a reference solution architecture...