I'm still recovering this morning from watching and celebrating the Boston Celtics winning their 17th NBA World Championship last night. It's hard to believe that just last year they were at the bottom of the league. Before the trades and work to assemble the new "Big 3" (Pierce, Garnett and Allen) people would not have even considered the Celtics to be a contender.
It kind of makes me think of Office Business Applications (OBAs). :-)
Up until recently it has been very challenging to develop, test and deploy OBAs for large companies. During my life prior to joining Microsoft (working for 14 years as a Microsoft customer in various application architect and development related roles) I did not really consider building applications in Office.
Now with the Office 2007 system, and our move towards using Visual Studio and .NET for Office development, we have a much more compelling technical and business case for OBAs.
What we're hearing from many of our customers is that typical business users spend most of their day in Office products such as Outlook, Word and Excel. Many companies are using OBAs to enable people to be more productive and work with external Line of Business (LOB) applications such as their CRM or ERP systems from right within Office. As you'd expect, there are also some great examples of OBAs and overall integration between Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS).
The OBA Central web site has some great information and resources on OBAs.
Check it out and let me know what you think ...