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OBA Partner Value
Office Business Applications are an emerging class of application that helps businesses unlock the value of line-of-business (LOB) systems by using the power of the Office Business Platform (the clients, servers, services, and tools that comprise the 2007 Microsoft Office system) to solve business problems.
OBAs provide user-friendly, intuitive systems that support the everyday needs of information workers. They help enterprises to increase the value of their existing IT investments by combining them in innovative ways. It’s inevitable that businesses will continue to demand more accessible information. They will expect seamless integration between LOB systems, with applications specifically designed to meet the everyday needs of information workers and support better business decisions. Partners’ OBAs will improve customers’ ability to get the most from their systems and help them to meet the competition head on.
Opportunities for ISVs? Back to Top
According to a Wipro research, 86% of ISVs already believe the 2007 Microsoft Office system offers an opportunity to extend their market. And 69% believe it plays an important role in the planning of new solutions. By building applications on the 2007 Office system, you can help bridge the gap between employees and their LOB systems. The opportunity to meet your customer’s specific needs improves significantly, and that may apply regardless of their industry or the systems they have in place. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that competing organizations can now see more value than ever in working together to produce solutions that can interoperate.
Microsoft is leading the way, working closely with systems providers such as SAP to integrate its technologies with their highly structured tools, providing the flexibility that information workers need. Whether you build a sales quote tool with a task pane that pulls information from one of these tailored systems, or a financial reporting application that automates workflow from spreadsheets, there’s a gap in the market that needs to be filled and a new market to pursue.
OBAs can be developed to meet a multitude of customer needs. For example, your customer may want to:
- Extend its LOB application to more users.
- Implement an application that consolidates multiple user interfaces into a 2007 Office system document or SharePoint Server Web page.
- Build a workflow application that helps users to regain control of critical documents.
The 2007 Office system can also help your customers adhere to their compliance requirements, providing the tools to build customized solutions that meet regulatory needs without slowing down processes. Above all, OBAs can be built to fit with the way people work. They combine structured business processes with human collaborative methods, supporting and enhancing progress, rather than hindering it. The 2007 Office system addresses these needs with unified communications, instant messaging, and enhanced document sharing to simplify ad hoc processes and keep people at the core of the operation.
People can:
- Retrieve and share information from any location as if they were in the office.
- Work more efficiently with fewer screens and applications.
- Adopt new solutions faster with easy-to-use interfaces, reducing training costs for the business.
Expand Your Business Back to Top
By building OBAs, you extend your reach to a growing market of customers looking to get more from their systems. OBAs can be used by many people within organizations, regardless of their technical skills. They can also help businesses increase their interaction with data, capture more valuable information, and improve decision making. Your customers want to reduce the cost and time it takes to get applications to market. Working with the 2007 Office system, your developers may no longer need to build systems from the ground up. They can simply assemble and extend components to design and develop powerful, customized applications that offer immediate business benefits quickly and cost effectively.
The latest features available in the 2007 Office system also offer additional, integrated functionality that opens doors to new solution opportunities and developments. OBAs can offer business intelligence, wikis, blogs, Web feed format RSS, and search features. These are a growing part of today’s business culture, and systems that contain this functionality are very much in demand.
Also, even if your customers don’t already have the Microsoft licenses required for your OBA, you have the opportunity to sell licenses to them through the ISV Royalty Licensing Program and capture incremental revenue for your company.
Enhance Your Technical Development Back to Top
ISVs building OBAs can take advantage of the Microsoft platform to deliver innovative, customized solutions to your customers faster. Developers can build applications using OBA Application Services, such as the Office Fluent UI—the most commonly used UI and the result of years of usability testing by Microsoft. This is possible through new licensing opportunities. In addition:
- The new Office Open XML open file format can extend document sharing across your customers’ organizations and their business partners’ organizations. It has become easier to produce automated documents that can be shared by anyone—across platforms and applications.
- The Office platform provides a powerful search engine portal to help your customers extract valuable information quickly. People can execute detailed queries and build company-specific searches.
- The Business Data Catalog can simplify the user experience by allowing Office applications to reference read-only data from LOB systems and combine it with information from other sources, helping boost productivity.
- Web sites can be customized to specific departmental or personal needs using the Web Site and Security Framework, which offers user- and role-based security to restrict sensitive information.
You can also integrate all 2007 Office system platform components into your OBA, including applications such as Microsoft Office Visio®, Project, and OneNote®. Development time is eased through the use of rich application programming interfaces, advanced integration, and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0.
Developers have access to a richer set of core application services, such as technical training and conferences. Deployment and maintenance of OBAs is now easier with advanced configuration and customization tools, resource kits, and solution templates to speed development and help you get your applications to market faster.
Become Part of an Ecosystem Back to Top
OBAs open up exciting new opportunities for the development and expansion of your business. Microsoft offers specially designed business and technical programs, and a vast partner ecosystem to help support your OBA development. Microsoft has also invested heavily in the thousands of professionals who can help you reach new markets. The Microsoft Partner Program provides strategy and opportunities for partners. This network is available to help develop mutually beneficial partner relationships, increase your customer opportunities, and, ultimately, generate more revenue. Microsoft offers a huge and increasing ecosystem of managed ISVs delivering Office solutions and services, including:
- 750,000 members
- 200 global ISVs
- 1,500 field-managed ISVs
- 1,800 Gold ISVs
- 2,900 Certified ISVs
- 5,000 information worker-competent partners
It also offers a new specialization within the information worker competency—Office Solutions Development—which is closely aligned to ISV experience. IDC research has shown that ISVs enrolled in the ISV Competency grow significantly faster than those outside it. | 