Building Office Business Applications
A new breed of business applications built on the 2007 Microsoft Office system
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Building Office Business ApplicationsJune 2006
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Building Office Business Applications
A new breed of business applications built on the 2007 Microsoft Office system
Javed Sikander
Microsoft Corporation
June 2006
Summary: This white paper introduces Office Business Applications (OBA), a new breed of easily customizable solutions that address real-world business problems through the 2007 Microsoft® Office system. OBA delivers people-centric, collaborative solutions to the enterprise through familiar Microsoft Office servers, clients and tools. This document discusses today’s business environment and identifies a “Results Gap” that contributes to reduced productivity and shows thatOBAis an effective new approach thatenables enterprises to achieve the “Last Mile of Productivity.” You will see that several key components of the 2007 Microsoft Office system can be used to develop Office Business Applications and that, when Line of Business Integration (LOBi) for Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server is released, it will further simplify the development of OBA. Finally, if you would like to develop a collaboration planning scenario using the 2007 Office system, just follow the steps outlined in this paper.
NoteThe final product names, such asthe next release of Microsoft Office products, currently code-named Microsoft Office "12” and feature names, included in quotation marks throughout this paper, are not yet released or finalized. The application names used in this articlerefer to the next versions of the products, unless otherwisespecified.
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Contents
Today’s Environment
The Results Gap
Enabling the Last Mile of Productivity
Challenges on the Last Mile
Office Business Applications
Easy To Use
Role-Based
Collaborative
Configurable
Contextual
The 2007 Microsoft Office system
Open XML File Formats
Extensible UI
Client/Server Integration
Strong Server Platform
Excel Services
InfoPath Forms Services
Search
Content Management
Business Intelligence
Workflow
Business Data Catalog
Based Upon Windows Infrastructure
LOBi for Office SharePoint Server extends the Microsoft Office system
Office Business Application Example: Collaborative Planning
Conclusion
Call to Action
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Today’s Environment
The worldwide business landscape is becoming increasingly challenging. Globalization has removed traditional trade barriers, opened new markets, and infused businesses with new talent and creativity. Companies have easier access to new customers and partners around the world. However, this increased reach has also made business more complex. Companies have to connect with tiers of business partners globally, orchestrate the flow of goods and services, and respond to customers at Internet speeds. Increasing variability, competitive pressures, and higher market volatility are forcing organizations to forecast more accurately and adapt more quickly to changing business conditions.
Under these challenging conditions, stakeholders expect companies to compete effectively and to grow revenues and profits. Companies, in turn, are asking their IT departments to drive business performance through continuous process innovations and rapid technology adoption.
The Results Gap
Companies rely heavily on information technology (IT) to help address these challenges, as evidenced by the huge investment in large financial management systems and solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM). Yet, many organizations have not realized the expected value from these investments. There is a clear gap between the efficiency and productivity increases corporate leaders expected to see and the actual return on investment(ROI) that they have experienced.
This “results gap” is caused by a fundamental inconsistency between how business systems work and how people work. The systems are based on transactional processes that are necessary to accomplish specific tasks, for example creating a Purchase Order. What they have not effectively captured are the ad hoc, local people-driven processes that invariably arise. The result is that decision makers take a “feed the machine” view to their corporate business applications, but rely more heavily on the people-to-people collaboration for making decisions and taking actions.
Enabling the Last Mile of Productivity
Software has become pervasive in every organization. Automation of back office business processes has been occurring for several decades, and huge investments have been made in these enterprise applications. Software has also driven a revolution in how people work. Spreadsheets, word processing, e-mail, browsers have profoundly changed the way people interact with information. These tools are the baseline work environment today for hundreds of millions of people and have had a tremendous impact on personal productivity.And this revolution is not complete—we predict many more substantial innovations in personal productivity software.
Information workers have powerful tools that help them garner insights, make decisions, take action and collaborate, but they’re largely limited to local or personal information. By contrast, very few systems are designed for the people who use them. We believe the Results Gap exists fundamentally because of this discrepancy. How do we tap the vast quantities of data that flow through our transactional systems and allow our people to use that information in a way that can magnify their impact on the business’s performance? How can we bring the level of productivity people experience with these powerful tools in the business world to the enterprise application world? We call these challenges “Enabling the Last Mile of Productivity.”
Challenges on the Last Mile
Application vendors, services providers, and IT environments have attempted to fill the Results Gap and enable the last mile of productivity. However, these efforts have fallen short for a number of reasons:
Inward facing design – Application vendors have taken a one-off approach, building independent and non-interoperable solutions. They have tried to address needs by designing and developing “cool” user interfaces, but have not fundamentally captured the people interactions and context, thereby have not made much positive impact on the overall end-user experience. Applications that are built independently rarely allow decision makers to collaborate in the process and take appropriate actions. Companies have spent billions of dollars trying to integrate these systems.
Lack of Agility – In an environment in which businesses evolve so rapidly, applications need to adapt to the changes. However, long implementation cycles frequently render the applications obsolete for business users by the time IT departments can deploy updated versions.
Fragmented offerings – Application vendors tend to hardcode core platform capabilities into solutions. For example, many vendors build workflow capabilities into solutions that have rudimentary analytics hard-coded into the user interface, or include a hard-coded reporting engine for role-specific reports. Since these key capabilities (Collaboration, Analytics, Portals, etc.) and the applications themselves belong to different levels within the IT infrastructure, these attempts at hard-coded integration fall short.
User Interface Integration - Workers need to correlate information from multiple systems to make sound business decisions. They frequently use manual processes that involve data reentry to address this need. There is a new breed of applications called Composite Applications that try to provide a solution, but only from a user interface integration perspective. User interface aggregation of tasks and screens from multiple applications solves one significant problem: It eliminates the need to jump between applications for business analysis. For instance, with an integrated user interface, a planner no longer needs to look at demand and supply in two separate systems to make inventory decisions. This solves a significant problem, but it is not enough. Unless individuals can take actions based on the analysis, this aggregation is of limited value. Information Workers need to be able to drive actions collaboratively while making use of the business context.
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Office Business Applications
To fill the Results Gap and enable the last mile of productivity, we need a new breed of business applications that are agile and adaptive . These applications are fundamentally different in many ways from the traditional monolithic enterprise programs.
Figure 1: Office Business Applications
Easy To Use
Information workers need to access business data to make decisions and take actions. However, LOB systems are usually accessible to only a relatively few individuals who have painstakingly developed their understanding and have learned how to reach the information they need. Information workers today have no choice but to have these few experts export useful business data from LOB systems into familiar tools like Microsoft® Office Excel® and share that in a disconnected fashion. OBA bridges this gap by seamlessly bringing business data into information workers’ familiar interfaces. This enables them to analyze the information by using powerful tools they already know how to use, thereby facilitating more rapid decision-making and quicker action. OBAs also push appropriate data back to the LOB systems to maintain data consistency across the enterprise.
Role-Based
OBAformalize people-centric processes and tie them back to system-centric processes. They let workers perform a particular task end-to-end without having to shift context, pull data from various data sources manually, or perform “out of loop” analyses with disparate applications. OBAs provide a role-based interface to information access, analysis and decision-making. Every role in an enterprise has specific tasks to perform. The data they need, the systems they use, and the decisions they make are unique to their roles— a worker on the plant floor needs to carry out a job order, a supervisor needs to be able to assign those jobs, and a planner needs to be able to schedule the jobs and resources. They may all need to access bill of materials (BOM), resource calendars, and material availability data; but individuals need to do so within their own role-based “windows” into the enterprise.
Collaborative
Much of the activity that is needed to achieve a business task happens outside of today’s enterprise systems. For example, a procurement manager who is finalizing sourcing contracts spends a lot of time researching the price, pulling data from various marketplaces into spreadsheets, and analyzing customer demographics. Then they interact with their preferred suppliers, share forecasts, commit to order splits and pull rates, and then finalize the procurement. Most of this activity happens outside enterprise systems. Only after they have successfully finalized the details, do they go to their ERP or purchasing systems and generate a sourcing contract. By contrast, OBA are inherently collaborative. The OBA platform allows developers to capture all aspects of a business process within familiar Microsoft Office interfaces. In the present example, the procurement manager can collaborate and make decisions directly from within familiar applications.
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Figure 2: Evolution of business applications
Configurable
OBA are self-service, adaptive and highly customizable by IT developers and end users. Because the collaboration and business rules are not hard-coded into the application, end users have considerable ability to configure the applications to their own needs. Power users can arrange their portals the way they like, and set business rules for certain tasks by using tools that they are already familiar with, usually without writing a single line of code. As business needs change, IT developers can rebuild the components and modify the applications relatively easily and with less code.
Contextual
OBA focus on business interactions, analytics and actionsto allow the users to make decisions and take actions in the context of the business problem(s) at hand. These applications do not “re-invent the wheel” for functions like data access and interactions, workflows, analysis and reporting, but they do leverage these capabilities from the underlying Office Business Platform. This decoupling allows for the applications to leverage the power of the Office systemfor base capabilities and to provide agile and highly customizable business capabilities.
The 2007 Microsoft Office System
The Office Business Application Platform forms a basis for designing and developingOBA. It provides a complete, integrated infrastructure for OBA design, development, deployment and maintenance.
Figure 3: Office system Architecture for Office Business Applications
Open XML File Formats
Adoption of the Open XML File Format across Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint facilitates rich server-side document manipulation scenarios andenables developers to include custom data payloads on the client directly within the document.These applications now save by default in this open file format, the specification of which has been published to openxmldeveloper.org.Furthermore, Microsoft has already released upgrades thatenable down-level clients to read the new file formats.By storing the document as XML, Microsoft is facilitating server-side document creation and manipulation without needing to instantiate the client applications on the server. Server advances, such as document property promotion, workflow, and search are among the many new capabilities that are available to OBA now that the underlying documents are consumable by server-side processes.
Extensible UI
Not only has the Office client user interface (UI) been redesigned for a more effective user experience, it has been opened up to developers as well.Custom solutions can be integrated both into the Ribbon and the new application-level task pane within the client.Organizations and software vendors can seamlessly integrate their solutions within the normal UI framework that users are expecting.This encourages adoption of new solutions, and facilitates integration of legacy enterprise application data with information worker content.
Client/Server Integration
With the 2007 Microsoft Office system, the line between client and server applications is blurring.Both Excel and Microsoft Office InfoPath® can now publish files to server-side services that enable users to interact with spreadsheets and forms by using only a browser. Furthermore, all Office Client documents can now expose their properties to the SharePoint lists in which they are hosted. These properties can be either edited on the client or within the SharePoint list.
Strong Server Platform
Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services provides baseline platform-level functionalities such as integrated workflow support, blogs & wikis, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and native support for ASP.NET2.0. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server2007 extends this functionality, presenting a unified suite of enterprise-scale applications that satisfies diverse business-critical needs, such as enterprise content management, business intelligence, integrated Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services as well as greatly enhanced search capabilities.
Excel Services
With the release of Excel Services, a user-created spreadsheet can be hosted on a SharePoint Server and exposed to clients and applications either through a Web-rendered Web part hosted in a SharePoint site or through an Excel Services Web service query. This enables users to define and host complex calculations for an application within an Excel spreadsheet. In essence, userswho have deep knowledge of a business function but no application programming experience can contribute directly to the application logic simply by using the tool they are most comfortable with: Microsoft Excel.