Office Business Applications

Last week at Microsoft's annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced a new intitiative entitled Office Business Applications. In short, OBAs (as they're called) are custom-configured line of business applications based on the 2007 Office Business Platform. While few would endorse replacing "mission critical" systems with this approach, it is unquestionably the right approach when it comes to structuring collaboration around desktop tools people already have and already know how to use. What's new in Office 2007 that takes this idea to the next level is ability to leverage Office Open XML in conjunction with BPMS/workflow technologies for such things as forms-based workflow, data-repurposing (taking ERP data and dynamically-populating an Excel template) and content-based routing.

You can read more about it at the OBA web site: www.obacentral.com