OBA Solutions Framework

My name is Atanu Banerjee, and I am an architect on the Microsoft Architecture Strategy Team. I work with customers and partners on next generation business solutions built on the 2007 Office System and other platform technologies. These solutions are called Office Business Applications (or OBAs).

I've decided to blog every weekday for a two month stretch, to describe a conceptual framework for building OBAs called the "OBA Solutions Framework" (summary below). The goal of the OSF is to provide architectural guidance on how to build / package / deploy / deliver these kinds of business applications.

Note that my views are that of a solution architect, and not necessarily the official views of any of the various Office development teams. As I talk with various architects outside of Microsoft about OBAs, I tend to get a similar set of 'architectual' questions which usually fall into three broad categories - "Why should I use an OBA for my business solution?", "What are the capabilities that I get?", and "How do I build an OBA?" So I'm doing the "OBA Blogathon" to provide a central repository of answers, similar to an OBA architectural FAQ. In my postings, I will point back to appropriate content (e.g. code samples, developer how-to guides) from different Microsoft product teams - most particularly to content on the OBA developer portal. 
 
The planned list of postings is below, although they may not appear in this order - and the list might change during the OBA Blogathon. Needless to say, feedback / discussion / comments on any of the postings are very welcome :-).

1. Overview
   1. Introduction to the OBA Solutions Framework
   2. What makes architecture for an OBA different?
   3. Anatomy of a business solution
   4. Different types of OBAs
   5. "People Ready SOA" via OBAs
2. Anatomy of the Platform: Office System as a platform for business solutions
   1. How can solution providers leverage Office client capabilities?
   2. How can solution providers leverage Office server capabilities?
3. OBAs and Composite Applications
   1. Composition in the Office Client
4. Anatomy of an OBA solution
   1. On-boarding users and roles
      1. Solution providers: Packaging role specific tasks and activities into SharePoint sites
      2. Solution consumers: Mapping users to roles, to get automatic discovery of role specific capabilities
   2. Providing information channels
      1. Leverage Office Client as an application platform
      2. SharePoint as the access point for business process artifacts (documents, actions, dashboards, ... etc.)
      3. Sample OBA built using VSTO, Outlook, and Excel services
   3. Supporting business processes
      1. Modeling a hierarchy of interconnected business processes (departmental, cross-functional, cross-organizational)
      2. Application patterns for Workflows within SharePoint
      3. Managing the life cycle of business rules
   4. Supporting the life cycle of business events and exceptions
      1. Detecting business events
      2. Notification of business events
      3. Resolution of business events
   5. Data and Integration
      1. Integrating SharePoint to other line-of-business systems
      2. Inventory enterprise data using the BDC, by managing metadata for business data entities and associated actions
      3. OBAs and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)
      4. OBAs and Composite Applications
      5. Taking data offline in an OBA
      6. Identity management for OBAs
   6. Performance Management - supporting a complete business cycle
      1. Monitor
      2. Analyze
      3. Plan
      4. Execute
5. Putting process around OBAs
   1. What might the life cycle of an OBA look like?
   2. How do you start building an OBA? (aka Introduction to Spiking)
   3. Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) for an OBA
      1. One possible set of steps for a solution architect to build an OBA
      2. Fitting OBAs into the Enterprise Architecture
      3. What are the roles and responsibilities in the solution provider organization?
      4. What are the roles and responsibilities in the organization where the solution is deployed?
   4. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for an OBA
6. Reference Application: Supply Chain Management
   1. Scenario
   2. Managing users and roles in this scenario
   3. Information Channels in this scenario
   4. Business rules in this scenario
   5. Data and integration in this scenario
   6. Performance management in this scenario
   7. Packaging and deployment in this scenario
7. Delivering SaaS (Software as a Service) through hosted OBAs
   1. How hosted OBAs present new opportunities for hosters
   2. How OBAs can play a key role in the new world of Software + Services
   3. Business implications
      1. The long tail of business applications
   4. Architecture implications
      1. Multi-tenancy
      2. Polymorphic application behavior
      3. Multi-channel access
      4. Composition
      5. Tooling
      6. Maturity model for business applications - supporting simple to complex business processes
   5. Operational implications
      1. Life cycle of hosted OBAs