Mike Walker's Ramblings about Industry Architecture

Financial Services OBA Component Library

At the Office Developers Conference this week I announced the release of the Financial Services OBA Component Library. The Financial Services OBA Component Library is a comprehensive set of OBA components that span across key areas in the Banking, Insurance and Capital Markets industries. The components are built in a composite way. This enables customers to assemble OBA components into existing or new business processes.

There are three things you need to know about the Financial Services OBA Component Library:

• First, these components are built as composite OBA components. This makes these components composable in a mash-ups fashion. Since the components are driven by industry scenarios they address discrete areas of functionality in financial services business processes.
• An example of this is a web part that is a 360 portfolio view of a insurance customer(shown in the screenshot above). Since this component is built in a composite manner, this component can be exposed across many different technology implementations (thick or thin client) OR business implementations (can be used in various other scenarios using the component as is but changing the systems it integrates to).  The Silverlight component is exposed as a web part in MOSS, the information is retrieved from the Business Data Catalog and the process is enabled by WF.
• Second, these components fit into an end to end set of business capabilities and processes. The Loan Origination Reference Architecture is a result of mashing-up a set of components that demonstrates not only the value of OBA but how OBAs can transform the business process.
• Third, components are all built on industry standards which makes these interoperable not only at the protocol level but at the business process level. These components break down the classic interoperability barriers. OBAs show customers new integration patterns and new uses of LOB information.

What are the scenarios?

Banking

• Lending Reference Architecture
• Online Banking
• Broker Commissions

Insurance

• Insurance Claims Processing (Coming in March)
• Insurance Channel Sales (Coming in March)
• Life and Annuity Components

Capital Markets (Coming in March)

• Create Structured Products Scenario
• Excel OpenXML

The library will include approximately 90+ OBA Components for Financial Services. Below is a list of the technology components that comprises the component library.

What is included?

1. Site Templates
2. Master Pages
3. Silverlight Components
4. Web Parts
1. BDC Web Parts
2. Extending Enterprise Content Management Web Parts
5. Industry Standards based Infopath Forms
6. Document Generation Framework
7. Custom XML based OpenXML Documents (Excel/Word)
8. State Machine WF Workflows
9. Series of standards based integration BDC Entities
10. WS-* enabled ACORD Web Services Messages
11. Office Communications Server Components

Over the coming months you will see more content and additional Financial Services scenarios. Keep an eye out for these additional materials:

1. MSDN Articles and Architecture Guidance
2. Source code will be provided for free
3. How To Articles
4. Scenario based Hands On Labs
5. MSDN Virtual Lab
6. Content can be found on:
1. Microsoft Connect - http://connect.microsoft.com
2. Financial Services Architecture Center - http://msdn.microsoft.com/FinServArch
3. My Blog (of course) - http://blogs.msdn.com/MikeWalker

When will it be released?

We will be rolling out guidance, source code and installable packages over the coming weeks. Keep an eye out on the MSDN Financial Services Architecture Portal.