OBA RAP for Price Management
Microsoft today released an Office Business Applicaion (OBA) Reference Architecture Pack (RAP) for Price Management. This is a critical area in the industry and many enterprises struggle with communicating the pricing rules to their sales field. Price Management is a crucial aspect of any company’s product sales strategy. Price is where the supply meets demand and is also the fundamental measure of a product or service value in the market. So to help in this critical scenario, Microsoft released an OBA RAP that show cases use of Office Application platform to build a real time price generation solution.
The Price Management RAP shows how to build architectures that unify people, process and technology through familiar Office 2007 user interfaces. It includes an architecture framework for Price Management with an OBA based scenario and BizTalk for the quote creation process. OBAs are emerging as new breed of business applications that connect existing line-of-business (LOB) systems with the people that use them every day through the familiar user interface of Microsoft Office. These OBAs bridge the gap between how business process systems work, and how people work. Price Management OBA helps in quote creation process both in online and offline mode and helps in real time decision making. It also simplifies the process of pricing rule communication especially to the field sales force. Creation and management of real time workflows is another critical area addressed by this OBA. Overall this OBA improves efficiency and ultimately lowers time-to-market, faster turn-around and reduced cost.
Please check it out on MSDN and let me know any feedback you may have. Source code is currently not there, but it'll be posted for you to download for free soon.
