The OBA blog has been quiet for a little while. We're taking an opportunity to expand the OBA team, and with that change new people are being brought into the OBA program to expand our efforts here. I'll be working with various folks to keep the blog posts rolling, and to keep providing information in the future. You can also find me here: http://blogs.technet.com/gray_knowlton, I've been working Open XML for nearly 4 years now.

We're still driving http://www.microsoft.com/office/oba, and we're still working with partner OBA solutions that you can find at http://www.obacentral.com.

OBA is alive and well!

Gray Knowlton,
Group Product Manager, Microsoft Office

Scot Hillier (Microsoft MVP) and Bhushan Nene just published an article titled “Building Excel 2007 and Excel Services Dashboards by Consuming Two-Dimensional Data from Web Services”.  The article shows how to develop a solution to consume web services in Excel and Excel Services to build dynamic dashboards.  The highlight of this solution is its ability to maintain the mapping between Excel objects and web services so that Excel and Excel Services workbooks can be refreshed on demand to show latest data.  Excel and Excel Services support such functionality for SQL Server and SQL Analysis Services but there is no out-of-box support for web services.

- Khawar

Interested in learning about  how others are building and using solutions built on MS technology but don’t want to read a long case study? Check out Microsoft.com Success Stories site-- a rich, interactive (Silverlight-powered) environment where you can experience stories about Microsoft-based solutions.

You can get a guided experience or explore on your own, search for specific solutions, or browse and create a playlist.

BTW, the initial release of the site highlights Office Business Application (OBA) success stories!

Winners of the OBA Solution of the Year Award Contest

1st place:       SmartAsset ODC

2nd place:       Intrasphere PharmaCM

3rd place:       IntelliSafe Vault Desktop for Microsoft Office 2007

Congratulations!!

Congratulations to Round 2 Finalists

• Bluespring BPM Suite 4.5
• Epicor Information Worker
• FirstPoint Enterprise Content Management
• IntelliSafe Vault Desktop for Microsoft Office 2007
•  K2 blackpearl
• Knowledge Driven Solution Accelerator
• ObjectRisk Enterprise Risk Management and Compliance Modular System
• Intrasphere PharmaCM
• SmartAsset ODC
• Xpertdoc Studio 2007

- Khawar

On behalf of the OBA team, congratulations to the 20 Round 1 finalists for the OBA Solution of the Year Award! An alphabetical list of round 1 finalists is produced below.

Round 2 finalists will be announced on Feb 10 at the start of ODC 2008 in San Jose, CA, and awards will be presented to the Top 3 solutions during ODC!

Details of the contest can be found at: https://www.obacentral.com/Pages/SolutionContest.aspx

Alphabetical list of Round 1 Finalists - OBA Solution of the Year Award Contest.

- Khawar

First, we're now only 18 work days away from ODC 2008!!

There's some excellent OBA related content and world class speakers in each and every track so if you haven't checked out the details yet, I encourage you to do so now. You can find details of the various tracks and sessions via the links below:

·         Pre-Conference

·         Architecture Track

·         Client Track

·         Real World Track

·         Server Track

·         Services Track

·         Executive Track

·         Hands-on Labs

·         Unconference

By the way,Hugh MacLeod of "Blue Monster" fame just confirmed he'll be at the conference. More here.

Sign up for ODC2008 here!

- Khawar 

We're proud to unveil the inaugural "OBA Solution of the Year" award contest sponsored by OBA Central and culminating at ODC 2008!

Details of the OBA Solution of the year contest are posted at OBA Central: https://www.obacentral.com/Pages/SolutionContest.aspx

If you have a great OBA solution or solutions and/or are a Systems Integrator/Consultant and are not listed it in OBA Central, this is a good time to join partners who are actively taking advantage of OBA Central + get a shot at winning OBA Solution of the Year.

Finalists will be announced at ODC 2008!

- Khawar

We now have 45 OBA related case studies avaiable on www.microsoft.com . If you are starting an OBA project or just looking to see how others are leveraging OBAs and the kind of benefits they are seeing, a great place to start is by looking through the case studies posted at the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/search.aspx?ProTaxID=3132

- Khawar