New year's gift - the OBA Book
At the Strategic Architecture Forum (SAF) recently, we launched a new book 'Office Business Applications - Building Composite Applications Using the Microsoft Platform'. We are working on getting the content on the architecture center, but in the meanwhile, enjoy the following foreward I wrote for the book:
Companies are adopting service orientation as a design principle to drive enterprise agility and business innovation. With service-oriented architecture (SOA), they can efficiently respond to business changes and evolve their IT systems rapidly. Service orientation is about decomposing the IT assets into easily consumable services. A composite application is the primary vehicle to deliver business value through service orientation and is a great way to aggregate these services to support cross-functional processes. Theoretically, composite applications allow for these services or components to be mixed and matched like blocks, allowing developers to customize applications to evolving enterprise needs relatively easily.
With the release of 2007 Microsoft Office System clients, servers, and tools, Microsoft delivers a true application platform that can be used to create collaborative, role-based, easy-to-use solutions that extend the traditional LOB applications and enterprise systems. Not only has Microsoft significantly improved the capabilities and tools for personal and business productivity, but it has also invested significantly in the extensibility and programmability of the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Microsoft calls these solutions Office Business Applications (OBAs) and recently announced the technology to design and develop OBAs.
This book is about composite applications and how they can be developed as OBAs using the 2007 Microsoft Office System. It explains the concept of a composite application and discusses in great detail the different aspects of composition. It provides an overview of the technologies available in the 2007 Microsoft Office System and gives several examples from various industries to build OBAs using composition at the presentation, business logic, and data layers.
This book is meant for solution architects, industry architects, or senior developers who are designing, developing, and deploying composite applications. The OBA examples from manufacturing, retail, and financial services industries will allow solution architects in these industries to understand the concepts in the context of scenarios specific to their industries.
Chapter 1 introduces the concept of a composite application and discusses the benefits of composition as enterprise alignment, adaptability, and agility. For each of the benefits, the author lists best practices that can be applied to achieve these benefits.
Chapter 2 presents the 2007 Microsoft Office System as the platform to build composite applications. The authors introduce the concept of OBAs. They discuss Microsoft technologies for composition in presentation, productivity, application, and data tiers. The chapter ends with guidelines to building an OBA.
Chapter 3 presents guidelines on deploying an OBA in an enterprise. It suggests a step-by-step approach for deploying OBAs to support a single business process at a time without re-architecting the entire backend system architecture in one big bang. It walks the readers through best practices for:
· Deploying departmental SharePoint sites to host local documents and processes.
· Connecting multiple departments.
· Connecting business processes to LOB systems.
· Adding data connections for cross-functional processes.
· Connecting business processes to the systems on the edge of the enterprise.
Chapter 4 presents a sample OBA designed to address the collaboration between a retailer and a manufacturer. It describes the challenges a manufacturing enterprise faces today and presents synchronization of demand, supply, and product development as the steps towards becoming a demand-driven supply network (DDSN) to drive enterprise agility and responsiveness. It then presents the architecture of a sample solution built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) for the manufacturing enterprise to achieve the goals of a DDSN. The sample solution is a great example of a composite application, stitching together documents, processes, business rules and industry standard schemas – all while bringing the power and familiarity of Microsoft Office clients to people-centric processes.
Chapter 5 presents a sample OBA designed to address the process of loan origination in financial banking. It explains the high-level process and identifies the complexities involved in implementing a solution. This OBA uses MOSS as a records repository and the hub for all records management processes. The OBA uses the Workflow Foundation in MOSS for user-centric workflows and implements long-running system workflows in Microsoft BizTalk Server.
Chapter 6 presents various examples of OBAs that can be designed to enhance collaboration between the retail store processes and the retail corporate systems. These OBAs can be built as dashboards for various store management processes such as promotions or workforce management.
Finally, the attached DVD on the back inside cover contains the bits for the supply chain collaboration OBA discussed in Chapter 4. You can also get these bits on MSDN at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa702528.aspx with documents and decks that explain the solution in detail.
The 2007 Microsoft Office System is a great platform to build composite applications. The investment Microsoft has made in the 2007 Microsoft Office System makes it easy to create collaborative and role-based OBAs that bring the power and familiarity of Microsoft Office to enterprise applications. I am super excited about the new Office System and OBAs, I am sure this will usher in a new era of business productivity. Please visit the Microsoft Architecture Center at www.microsoft.com/architecture and the Microsoft MSDN Solution Architecture Center at www.msdn.com/architecture. Drop me a line and let me know what you think of the book and the new 2007 Microsoft Office System.
Javed Sikander
Director, Industry Architecture
Microsoft Corporation
Email: javeds@microsoft.com
Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/javeds
