Hi, my name is Jay Paulus and I’m part of the team responsible for evangelizing Office as a platform for building business applications.  Though developers have been building applications using the Microsoft Office system for many years now, with this release, the Office system – both client and server, have reached critical mass as a platform.  The addition of workflow, Open XML file formats, enterprise search, and ASP.NET 2.0 integration among other things enables developers to create a new type of solution we call Office Business Applications, or OBAs.  These new applications help to bridge the gap between user & document based process and the transactional systems that most companies use as a back-end.

By starting this blog, the team and I are hoping to start a communication channel to facilitate and accelerate awareness and knowledge about OBAs and OBA development.  I hope that we can start a dialog which will help crystallize the OBA concept and breed some creativity for new types of solutions.

If you are new to OBAs, a good place to start is by visiting the recently updated MSDN OBA Developer Portal http://msdn.microsoft.com/oba. This site helps to flesh out the vision around OBAs and brings together some useful resources to start creating your own. 

If you have any feedback e.g. suggestions regarding content you’d like to see on the OBA Developer Portal or have questions about OBA development, feel free to post them to the blog comment section.

- Jay