Office Business Application Patterns
Lately I have been giving some thought to OBA patterns, looking at what people are building out there with 2007 Office System, the following four patterns are very obvious
1. Officization of the clients - I see lots of examples of basically putting Office clients on top of enterprise and LOB systems. The idea is to bring the power and familiarity of Office to the end users. This reduces training costs, makes the end users more productive and helps IT to roll out new functionality easily. If you are scratching your head on how to do this, Visual Studio Tools for Office is your friend. The article at http://msdn2.Microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa722570.aspx tells you more about how to create custom task panes in Office clients using the recently release VSTO SE
2. The second pattern I see is the Composite Applications. I covered this topic in my previous blogs, I have talked to numerous architects who are using the 2007 Office System for composition, please stay tuned for a complete Architecture Journal issue focused on composite apps, you can sign for a free copy here:http://www.architecture.net/2006/issue9/
3. Collaboration is the third pattern I see. Whether it is collaborating work within or across the enterprise, there are unstructured processes that surrounds a structured business process that are mostly unaddressed by the LOB systems or happy-path applications. People are using the Microsoft Office Share Point Server to build OBAs to capture this business activity
4. Business Scorecards is the fourth OBA app pattern. As IWs are inundated with information, having to deal with plethora of systems and make real time decisions, they are looking to manage their work from role based, highly personalized dashboards. Sales managers do not want to run reports agains their CRM to figure out what deals are being followed and how a region is tracking on its quota, they want this information to feed into a personalized scorecard that is always on and alerts them when execptions happen. Microsoft PerformancePoint Server allows you to build OBAs that enable real time visibility and decision making in your enterprise
More OBA patterns anyone? drop me a line, thanks!
