We held a Office Business Application (OBA) workshop at Microsoft Singapore last week. The session gave attendees (both our enterprise customers and ISV partners) an introduction of our OBA initiative. In the session, I covered an overview of the business drivers and rationale behind OBAs and our esteemed MVP, while Praveen Srivatsa dived into the technical bits, showcasing new client and server capabilities offered by Microsoft Office System 2007.

We want to thank all attendees for the support, and for staying with us till the evening - even as the workshop ran almost 1 hour behind time due to the sheer amount of information.

A number of questions were raised during the session, and I'd like to post our responses here:

  • Reading Office 2007 Documents with Office 2003: Microsoft Office 2003 can open, edit, save to the new Office 2007 file formats with the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack download (for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.)
  • Microsoft Office Open XML format: More information about Open XML can be found here. Some other points raised on OOXML:
    • The Ecma International standards body approved Office Open XML as an Ecma standard on 7th Dec 2006. Read more in this press release.
    • In the workshop, we showed how an Open XML file can be manipulated by renaming it to a .zip file and then manually changing its content. In the real world, this can be done programmatically with .NET 3.0's System.IO.Packaging namespace -- demonstrating the extensibility and malleability of the format. Go to the Open XML Developer web site for loads of samples.
    • For those interested, check out the Open XML Translator project at SourceForge that will help translate between Open XML and OpenDocument formats.
  • A number of attendees wanted to learn more about backend Line-of-Business (LOB) systems integration (e.g., SAP). Depending on specific scenarios, integration can be done by consuming web services directly from the client, or with Microsoft SharePoint Server's Business Data Catalog (BDC). 
  • There were additional discussions on security, and Lotus Notes integration.

The post-workshop survey also yielded some interesting insights:

  • About 85% of the attendees felt more aware and positive about OBA after the session
  • A majority of the folks felt that knowledge management (business intelligence, management reporting) OBAs bring the greatest benefit to their organizations.

The slide decks from the session are attached. Do check out this web site again in a week's time when I'll post some sample codes.

File iconOffice Business Application - Introduction.zip

File iconOffice Systems Technology Session 1.zip

File iconOffice Systems Technology Session 2.zip

Meanwhile, if you are from Singapore, I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback on how OBAs can help you and your business. Write to me through this contact form.