Building OBAs with 2007 Office System
So what are the capabilities of the 2007 Office System that allow you to design and develop these new breed of agile applications that extend the typical LOB systems, here are the top 6
1. Workflow - The integration of Windows Workflow Foundation into the MS Office SharePoint Server allows developers to create simple workflows and attach them to the document libraries in SharePoint. Also, users can use the SharePoint Designer to create code-free custom workflows. For power users and developers, you have the WF object model in Visual Studio
2. BI - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 expands beyond the traditional portal and dashboard to provide users with interactive Business Intelligence portals that allow for substantial data manipulation and analysis. Users can create dashboards from multiple data sources without writing code. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be defined from Excel Services, SharePoint Lists, Analysis Server cubes and a variety of other sources. Because this data is hosted with SharePoint, it can be an active participant in other SharePoint services such as Search or Workflow
3. Content Management - Functionality from Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 (MCMS) has been rolled into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. With this functionality, users can take advantage of comprehensive Web content management features available directly from the SharePoint platform
4. Search - Enterprise Search in MOSS is a share service that provides extensive and extensible content gathering, indexing and querying, supports full-text and keyword searches
5. Business Data Catalog - BDC allows enterprise data to be exposed to Web Parts, Infopath Forms Server and Search. This enables developers to build applications that allows users to interact with LOB data in their familiar interfaces
6. Open XML File Format - adoption of Open XML File format across the 2007 Offuce System facilititates rich server-side document manipulation. By storing the document as XML, Microsoft is facilitating server-side document creation and manipulation without needing to instantiate the client applications on the server. Server advances, such as document property promotion, workflow, and search are among the many new capabilities that are available to Office Business Applications now that the underlying documents are consumable by server-side processes
