An update on OBA Office Business Applications and underlying technologies - Philippe's ISV Blog - Site Home

IBF will be supported until the next version of Office comes along. LoBi is being re-designed and will come in a different form as part of the next Office System version. Today you can develop powerfull OBA's with VSTO 2005 SE, web services, etc . Sharepoing Server 2007 (MOSS) , has teh BDC the Business Data Catalog which is an excelletn way of integrating data coming from other sources. It allows cross datastore searches, etc . Example : when you search for company "ACME" on the MOSS Portal, thanks to the BDC, you would get combined results from the Office documents mentioning "ACME" but also from SAP or Siebel or Oracle or Dynamics or CRM records about "ACME" . The results allow you to view the data, if you want to transact ( update) you need to go via the business logic of each application . BDC is not a mashup or composition tool for transacting with different back-end systems.