Last week I was in Chicago to attend/speak at a manufacturing conference. I met and talked to many small and medium manufacturers and it was fascinating to hear them talk about the role of MS technologies in their product life cycle. They were all mostly from the IP side of companies who are perhaps one of the most affected by the economic down turn and were having to deal with dwindling budgets for the last couple of years although things have started looking up recently. One of the discussion points were around MRP applications and opening up the data to non users of the application- namely Execs and Casual users. I did a live demo of the new product called IBF - Information bridge framework and it was very well recd.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/ibframework/default.aspx
http://www.officezealot.com/ibframework/ 

The amazing thing is that the audience was not even half technical and it still resonated. the demos was a simple example of retrieving CRM information from Outlook and displaying it in the new “IBF UI“. The resulting information is not only good for casual analytics ( like sales from a particular region or a sales rep etc ) but could also be tied to back end update web methods that can also update live ERP data. the IBF framework also has a client side “Context Action Engine” that can be used to cache local context which can be then propagated to other client side applications. Here is a screen shot from an article on msdn on IBF.  

Details on creating this kind of a user interface can be found in this article . and yes, it is available for free redist once it is released.   If you are an ISV in the Line of Business space then you have to look at this product very carefully as it has the potential to make your app upgrade look very compelling. You can also think about the kinds of business models this enables. For ex: should you have charge a “lite CAL” for a non user who wants to just plug in to your web services to get the data into their email system ?  

Also check out the new ISV section in the MSDN web site http://msdn.microsoft.com/isv/
Check this site ou and give me your feedback on what you think ...