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Office Business Applications (OBA) are an emerging breed of application that leverages the power of the Office Business Platform. People typically perform significant additional work outside of the formal processes of a line-of-business (LOB) system as they collaborate with other people via phone and email, obtain information from multiple sources in the form of documents and spreadsheets, and switch between online and offline modes for meetings and business trips. Office applications help simplify this interaction by fitting within the informal processes that information workers actually follow.

Business users are accustomed to getting work done through a document-centric paradigm.  A document is created, revised, sent for approval, distributed, synchronised with LOB systems, and then filed for future use.  LOB systems are great at handling transaction-oriented activities.  But they are not suited to capture the significant work that happens in between the activities – the ad hoc collaboration.

Workflow

Getting work done often requires multiple people to work with the same document.  It’s too easy for documents to get “lost” in the Inbox, saved to the wrong location, end up with multiple versions, or otherwise taken out of the loop.  Windows Workflow Foundation forms an integral part of the Office Business Platform to facilitate automated workflow processes. 

Search

The Office Business Platform offers a powerful search engine portal to find relevant results across the organisation quickly.  Not only is document content indexed, but a flexible metadata system
allows advanced queries to be executed based on projects, people, and document types.

Business Data Catalog

Users require data from LOB systems every day yet the data is typically accessible only to a handful of individuals well versed in the LOB system interface. The Business Data Catalog, or BDC, allows Office applications to reference read-only data from LOB systems.  For example, using BDC, an InfoPath based purchase form could be setup to extract and auto fill customer details from one system, product details from another system, and financial details using a financial institution’s
web service, thereby greatly simplifying the overall user experience.

Extensible User Interface

The 2007 Microsoft Office client applications, such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and InfoPath support a wide variety of customisations to add the exact features that people need.  Custom Task Pane can host controls such as lists, buttons, and text boxes to present information from other sources for reference or integration within documents.

Web Site and Security Framework

Companies can create web sites that are heavily customised for specific business, department, or personal needs.  For example, a sales manager can see pending deals, top performers, and employee-level statistics while members of the team are only able to see information identified as relevant to their role.