Office reaches to business apps

Microsoft is to link applications in its Office suite more closely with other enterprise applications, so staff will be able to interact more easily with business systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM), via tools such as Outlook.

The software giant outlined plans for what it calls “People-Ready” business systems at its Tech Ed 2006 conference for IT professionals in Boston. These systems will be built around new capabilities coming in Office 2007 known as Office Business Application (OBA) services, enabling developers and customers to extend Microsoft applications by building links to their existing line-of-business software.

Renaud Besnard, Office Business Applications product manager, said that Microsoft wants to see Office applications become a user-friendly front-end for major enterprise applications.

“There is typically a performance gap between back-end systems and the user interface,” Besnard said. “Many companies have invested lots in applications, but return on investment can be limited.” Often applications are difficult to use, and workers consequently resort to creating parallel processes to achieve their ends, he added.

OBA services consist of the new extensible user interface in Office 2007, plus workflow; search; the Business Data Catalog; Microsoft’s Open XML file formats; and the Web Site and Security Framework.

As part of the portfolio, Microsoft will also release a toolkit for SharePoint Server 2007 called Line-of-Business Interoperability (Lobi). This development framework will let firms build transactional processes within an Office application environment. This toolkit will ship with adapters to link multiple back-end systems to Office applications, Besnard said, and will also allow the customisation of applications.

A technical preview of Lobi for SharePoint Server is due at the end of 2006. Besnard said some interoperability projects are already in progress. He cited the example of Duet, a joint development between Microsoft and SAP to enable users to access business processes and data through Microsoft Office applications.