Steve Fox's OBA Ramblings : OBA Sample Application Kit

OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP & Siebel Released to Web

Steve Fox — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:57:09 GMT

Over the past few months, we’ve received some very positive feedback on the OBA Sample Application Kits that we’ve released. Well, today we release to web the latest in the family of kits, the OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP & Siebel. Included in this kit are:

Overview whitepaper
Source code
Installation guide
Developer guide

As per the diagram below, this latest OBA kit provides guidance on how developers can integrate Outlook and MOSS 2007 with Siebel and SAP. It integrates a variety of key MS technologies (e.g. BizTalk LOB adapters, WCF, VSTO, and so on) to help you understand how you can integrate LOB systems such as Siebel and SAP into your Office and SharePoint solutions.

The actual developer kit can be found here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sapsiebel. And for more information on other OBA developer kits, you can go here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cc442491.aspx.

Enjoy!

Steve

Learn how to integrate PeopleSoft, Outlook and MOSS

Steve Fox — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 06:51:09 GMT

Office Business Application (OBA) development is growing in importance thus continues to be an integral part of the Office platform developer story. To that end, we recently completed a new resource that could be used for OBA training specific to PeopleSoft and Office integration. This HOL uses the OBA Starter Kit for PeopleSoft as the demo environment and provides a comprehensive walkthrough on how to a) create web services that wrap around PeopleSoft components (both native and custom), b) consume those services in a custom Outlook client (the design can be extrapolated to other Office custom clients), and c) integrate the service with the MOSS Business Data Catalog.

The new resource, a hands-on lab that is now publicly available, is a great way for you or your customers to get ramped up on how to integrate Office and PeopleSoft.

The OBA Starter Kit for PeopleSoft is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cc442491.aspx

The new OBA PeopleSoft Hands-on Lab is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/isv/oracle/

Enjoy!

Steve

The OBA Sample Application Kits

Steve Fox — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:07:00 GMT

Just a quick post to check out the OBA Sample Application for Kits MSDN page. The kits provide comprehensive guidance on how to integrate Office with SAP and PeopleSoft (and we'll have others in the future). The kits include whitepaper, install guide, technical walkthrough doc, and source code. We announced the latest of the kits (the OBA Sample Application Kit for PeopleSoft) last week at Kurt DelBene's keynote at Collaborate 08.

You can get to the page here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cc442491.aspx

From this page, you can get to the individual kits.

Check it out! This is awesome stuff, and it is a rarity to find kits that provide guidance against these two very popular LOB Systems (that is PeopleSoft and SAP).

Cheers,

Steve

Integrate Office with SAP...

Steve Fox — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:17:00 GMT

You may have heard of Duet, an out of the box OBA that supports a number of different scenarios for the enterprise (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/duet/FX101686211033.aspx?ofcresset=1). Duet is a great solution and covers a wide variety of scenarios. If you're looking to hook the Office system into SAP programmatically on a smaller scale, though, what do you do? You have a couple of options depending on what you're trying to integrate with. Assuming you've got your Web services created, you can either hook into the Office client using Visual Studio and you can integrate with MOSS using either the iView Web part, the Business Data Catalog (BDC), or through PerformancePoint Server. If you're looking to integrate with the client or through the BDC, I've posted some guidance that may be able to help you. I developed this in partnership with Softagon, an IT firm based out of San Francisco, and have delivered this guidance in the form of a 'kit' -- more precisely an OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP (v. 2.0). The kit includes a whitepaper, install guide, technical overview, and some source code to get you started. The only bummer is that you'll need to recreate the SAP environment. But once you do that, you can recreate the solution around which the kit was built (a specialty travel package application).

You can find the kit here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/obasapsak. The kit shows you how to integrate SAP Web services with Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 and MOSS 2007 using Visual Studio 2008 (specifically Visual Studio Tools for Office 3.0).

If you're looking for guidance for earlier versions of Visual Studio, I've also released the OBA Sample Application Kit for SAP, v. 1.0. You can find that here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb498189.aspx. This shows you how to integrate SAP Web services with Excel and PowerPoint 2007 using VSTO 2005 SE.

More kits will come in the future, so check back for more information or go to the OBA Developer Portal: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905528.aspx.

Steve