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 Syrinx works with clients throughout New England and across the United States to architect, design, develop, and deploy SharePoint implementations. Working on fully outsourced projects, as part of your team, helping to train your team, or rescuing projects in trouble, we are comfortable doing it all. Projects from a couple weeks to several months in duration, reference clients available. Contact us today - info@syrinx.com, or toll free (888) 579-7469 and press 1 to speak to someone now!

What is OBA?

Office Business Applications (the acronym OBA, often pronounced OWE buh) are applications that combine the power of the Microsoft Office client program suite with the server-side abilities of SharePoint in order to solve line-of-business (LOB) problems. Often times a group or department will need a solution to service a particular workflow, and no enterprise-scale application will exist to fit this need. Traditionally Outlook, Word, Excel, and Access were used to develop a “home-grown” application that helped automate this departmental workflow. In financial services, this might be some Excel worksheets that are linked together to each other or a back end data source to crunch numbers for trading decisions. In a sales organization, this might be a pipeline reporting tool built using Access. A research publishing organization might use Word to provide a templated document generation system, pulling data together to produce regular reports in a standardized format. 

Traditionally three problems have existed when developing these types of applications. First, it can often require a large amount of effort to develop some truly useful and time-saving applications. Long timeframes and large budgets can be an impediment to developing solutions that only service a small department. Second, automating your processes and coding against the COM interface of the older versions of Office can be tricky and brittle. Third, if your application becomes a big success and grows outside the boundaries of one department, it can be difficult to scale up. 

With OBA, Microsoft tackles these three problems and makes things much easier to work with and scale up as needed. OBA uses SharePoint on the back end for development, but instead of using the browser as an interface, the Office 12 applications interface directly with SharePoint. This allows for a flexible and scalable data and document storage platform on the back end, and a malleable and familiar interface on the front end. OBA solutions get to piggy-back on the built-in capabilities of workflow, search, the BDC (Business Data Connector), and security from MOSS. They also benefit from a more straightforward interface on the Office side, making it much easier to write add-ins for Office programs that are stable and reliable using tools like VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office). The solutions can be developed more quickly, and can more closely model the way people work by living in the Office applications that everyone spends so much time in anyway. 

OBA applications can either be custom developed for an organization, or can be purchased as canned solutions developed by an ISV. Both types of solutions are showcased at OBA Central, https://www.obacentral.com/default.aspx. This is the official portal for OBA technologies, and contains lots of links to resources for building your OBA solution. Please also feel free to contact Syrinx for help in developing an OBA-based solution for your company or organization. Our contact info is at the top of the blog.
Posted: Dec 27 2007, 02:39 PM by AndrewG | with no comments
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