Composite Applications and OBAs
I get this question very often, how does Office Business Applications (OBA) compare with Compaosite Apps (CA), following are my thoughts
The purpose of CA is to integrae existing enterprise system assets and create a single place to go for users to achieve a complete task, without having to jump betwen applications and reenter data. CA are built by combining presentation, processes, business logic and data from multiple existing applications.
Data and process disparities exist and we have seen various technologies to address this, ETL/EAI for instance is about moving data and transforming it to confirm to a standard schema that the enterprise (or a dept) has adopted, it doesnt address process. Web services projects still simply makes this integration easier, by making systems interoperable using XML. The goal here is enterprise efficiency. This use of ETL and Web services is mainly to address point to point integration, sw rationalization or infrastructure consolidation, I see these as efficiency patterns
If you adopt Service Orientation as a design principle and go through a well thought through decomposition exercize, building Web services facades on your enterprise system capabilitie, you make the environment more agile. Now you can mix and match these facades into a end user application that will be nimble enough to adapt to change. This use of SO and web services is all about business transformation, speed and flexibility, I see these as enterprise agility patterns
So, I believe CA is the end product of a SO exercize, as a smart guy in my team said, SO is a design principle, what you do when you are engaged in a SO exercize is you build CAs
The idea of OBA includes the concept of CA. MS Office Sharepoint is a great place to build composite applications. You can very easily aggreate presentation/UX from various applications by creating Web parts, you can define a standard meta schema using BDC and then populate the data from a Web service, the BDC entity can feed into a Web part. For process level integration, you can create a common set of people to people workflows with workflow foundation, either using Sharepoint Designer without writing code or use the more powerful Visula Studios to create code for the activities. You could use business scorecard manager to aggreate business logic and define KPIs across the systems.
