Verticalware : Office Business Applications

Plant Floor OBA Virtual Lab

javeds — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 10:16:28 GMT

Whether you are on a slow bandwidth connection or are lazy to downlaod the OBA RAP for PF vpc, now you can see how it works using the virtual lab:

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7091160

Where are all the Architects gone

javeds — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 01:02:00 GMT

I have been looking to hire a good architect to lead the OBA architecture work in my team, if you know anyone who might be interested in this role which is based in Redmond, please have them ping me, here is the JD:

Are you interested in driving the thought leadership for Office Business Applications for the architect and developer community? Do you have the passion and energy to bring the 2007 Office platform vision to the industry? If so, come join the Architecture Strategy Team in the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division.

With the 2007 Office System, Microsoft has made significant investments in Servers, Clients and Tools that allow for creation of role-based, collaborative business applications that extend the capabilities of enterprise systems and bring the power and familiarity of Microsoft Office to LOB systems users. We call these apps Office Business Applications or OBAs. While the product teams are developing the frameworks sample solutions, in AST we are driving the OBA thought leadership for the architect community, especially in vertical industries. We do this by creating Reference Application Packs to create Architecture Guidance for key industry scenarios. We engage with customers to validate our guidance and work with ISVs and SIs to create OBA momentum.

In this role, you will:

·     Lead a small group of vendors to create reference applications for a variety of industry scenarios that you identify, prioritize and develop, working with a small team of Industry Architects
·     Work on crystallizing the OBA concept, developing OBA architecture and development patterns, creating guidance on the deployment and management of OBAs
·     Evangelize the OBA reference applications to architects & developers and internally to Microsoft field including Architect Evangelists, Developer Evangelists and other relevant field roles
·     Share the responsibility of feeding online (Office System msdn architecture center , Skyscrapr ) and offline (Architecture Journal , Journal Book Series) with OBA content
·     Engage with product teams to influence and impact OBA product direction and capabilities with industry learning and best practices
·     Understand the competition and develop a comprehensive compete strategy for Microsoft

We are looking for a highly motivated individual with a deep understanding and experience of developing, architecting and deploying both client and server-based solutions. The ideal candidate should have deep expertise on various Office technologies (Open XML File Formats, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Office Clients), .NET Framework 3.0 and Visual Studio Tools for Office. The individual should also have excellent communication and leadership skills. Ability to execute on ideas and analytical skills are most critical. The ideal candidate will have a technical undergraduate degree with a minimum of 7-9 years of relevant experience and demonstrated success working with the field and enterprises

New year's gift - the OBA Book

javeds — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 01:32:00 GMT

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[1].

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

[1] http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905528.aspx

If you have read so far and cant wait for the content to appear on MSDN, drop me a line and I will see if we can ship you a copy for free

2007 Office system Developr Map

javeds — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 01:37:00 GMT

An updated version of the 2007 Office system developer map is live on MSDN. This is a cool all-up view of the client and server extensibility mechanisms. We’ve printed a bunch of these and will be giving them out at TechEd Developer in Barcelona and Dev Connections in Las Vegas in November

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=771AEB45-9D27-4D1F-ACD1-9B950637D64E&displaylang=en

http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/9/c/09cda3f2-6d3d-4082-aec5-9a62b7679ecf/Office2007OMMap.exe

OBA on C9

javeds — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 10:39:00 GMT

Brief OBA discussion on C9

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=245040#245040

Yo, lets RAP!

javeds — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 19:14:00 GMT

Office Business Application Reference Architecture Pack for Supply Chain

Ok, here it is, a complete example of an Office Business Application built using the 2007 Office System. You can download the reference bits, learn how to build and see what one looks like, all at the newly launched OBA RAP page

OBAs are an emerging class of applications that connect users to existing LOB systems through the familiar Microsoft Office interface, they extend the transactional systems with more people centric and collaborative capabilities.

In this reference architecture, Microsoft provides an example of how the interactions in a multi-tier Retail Supply Chain can be implemented with the 2007 Office System, providing the users a powerful yet familiar interface. A Merchandise Planner at the Retailer can easily share forecast with the Production Planner at the Manufacturer at the beginning of the sales season. As the demand fluctuates, the inventory analyst can monitor potential stock outs, and pull orders to avoid them. The Production planner at the Manufacturer can analyze each forecast change request, look at the POs from their tier1 supplier and move orders to fulfill the changes. With the 2007 Office System, all the roles in the SC can have their specific ‘Sites’ that they can tailor to their own needs. There is no need to copy data from transactional systems into spreadsheets to analyze, share and make decisions, the planners can create an excel file and publish it to a document library…they can choose to publish only parts of it, or only the values. To send it across the enterprise, no need to send sensitive information over email, as excel files are published to a doc library, a workflow is triggered that extracts the data and creates a Rosetta Net message that is sent over securely.

I am thrilled at how easy it is for developers to compose an application from building blocks such as BDC business entities to access data from LOB system and then feed into the UI extensibility components such as custom taskpanes. This should be every app developers dream, providing end users the ability to perform a complete task such as PO analysis and approval, completely within Outlook.

Stay tuned for more

Composite Applications and OBAs

javeds — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:44:00 GMT

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.

Building OBAs with 2007 Office System

javeds — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 00:38:00 GMT

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

Office Business Applications (repost)

javeds — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 00:37:00 GMT

Another way to frame the Results Gap problem is to look at what is missing when it comes to user productivity. People use powerful but simple to use tools such as spreadhseets to analyze information and make decisions. Much of this limited to local and personal use and they deal with same clunky interfaces have a significantly less productive experience when the use LOB or their enteprise systems. We call this 'The Last Mile of Productivity' problem, the powerful tools and technologies that makes users producitve when it comes to personal use has not reached their business use of systems.

So, how do we fill the Results Gap and bridge the 'Last Mile of Productivity'. I believe a new breed of business applications are needed that extend the capbilities of LOB systems but allow people to user powerful tools to consume information and make decisions.

These business apps:

· Easy to use – allow users to use familiar and powerful Office clients for information consumption

· Role-Based – are not one-size-fits-all, but have role specific interfaces for greater productivity and decision making

· Collaborative – are collaborative, allowing people-to-people interactions, and address the ad-hoc business activity surrounding a business process

· Configurable – are highly customizable, by end users and IT alike. As the business landscape changes decision makers can customize these apps to adapt and enable the change

· Contextual – allow users to make decisions in the context of business problem(s) they are working on

We call these Office Business Applications. The investments Microsoft has made with the 2007 Office System not only provide a unfied and much richer client experience but also server side capabilities, such as workflow, analysis service and backend data connectivity.

Please visit the newly launced Office Business Applications Developer Portal and look at whitepape on LOBi. We will talk more in my next post. As always, your comments and feedback is welcome!

The Results Gap

javeds — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 03:30:00 GMT

If you have invested millions of dollars in ERP and other LOB systems, but still do not see returns in terms of user productivity and ability to make timely decisions and take actions in your organizations, read on! I believe there is a huge gap between...(read more)