Microsoft Launches Office Business Application Strategy

Keeping on track with the initial "People-Ready" trajectory introduced on the opening day at TechEd 2006, Microsoft unveiled the Office Business Application Strategy.

The newly outlined strategy aims at managing the inner workflow of an enterprise by offering a familiar tool such as Microsoft Office as a way of integrating with other business applications and structured processes.

The end result focuses on the processes followed by the information workers as to increase their performance and impact simultaneously with reducing costs, saving time and improving decision making. Furthermore, the Microsoft initiative is also addressed to other business application providers to manage solutions that will help their products integrate with Office Business Applications.

Microsoft Office 2007 offers through its platform capabilities a fertile soil for the development of Office Business Applications, capabilities named Office Business Application (OBA) Services and consisting of: workflow, search, the Business Data Catalog, Microsoft Office Open XML Formats, Web Site and Security Framework and a brand new user interface.

Office Business Application Services are currently available for beta testing, with a 2007 Office system release.

In the same context, Microsoft also announced that by the end of 2006, a line-of-business interoperability named LOBi for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server will be available. This will work together with Microsoft Office client applications and Office SharePoint Server 2007.