Building Office Business Applications - A new breed of business applications built on the 2007 Microsoft Office system

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We’ve recently launched the Office Business Applications Developer Portal which has got loads of information on developing applications using Office 2007.

Why integrate Line of Business systems with Office? Well here’s just a few reasons why :-

  • It extends the reach of your existing Line of business applications outside of the department that traditionally uses it – For example you can allow a Sales Person to have access to stock information when creating a quotation in word.
  • No more copy and paste – Most content is created in Office and requires copying and pasting from multiple applications. It’s slow and error prone. Now you can bring the data directly into the application your users is creating the content in.
  • People know how to use Office – It’s easier to bring the information into Office than to give users yet another process or tool they’ve got to learn and user.

There’s a good little document on there called Building Office Applications as well as giving your more information on LOBi – a set of services designed to support and enhance Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Business Application Services. What LOBi gives you is

  • Surfacing reusable line-of-business data in the Microsoft 2007 Office Suites. Business data and processes can be surfaced as objects in Office rich-client applications. Write once and reuse objects anywhere across the Office Suites.
  • Providing deep interaction with line-of-business applications. Processes can be surfaced in Office and results can be written back to underlying applications.
  • Taking existing processes offline. Processes in a line-of-business application can be surfaced in Office and taken offline, and then synchronize with the business application when re-attaching to a network