The Redmond software maker is continuing to beat the developer drum for its information-worker platforms with Office Business Application Services and Line of Business Interoperability (LOBi) capabilities.

BOSTON – Microsoft is making more of its gut Office and SharePoint technologies and services available to third-party application developers.

Microsoft has been beating the developer drum for its SharePoint and Office technologies for months, if not years. But at the TechEd conference here, company officials crystallized some of the concepts they've been evangelizing.

On June 12, company officials announced that they have christened six Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 platform technologies as "Office Business Application (OBA) Services." Officials also said to expect Microsoft to add more OBA service to its fold some time next year, when it introduces additional and so-far unspecified services, christened LOBi (Line-of-Business Interoperability) technologies.

The existing set of OBA Services, to which Microsoft is encouraging developers to write commercial and custom applications, consist of workflow, search, the Business Data Catalog, the RibbonX version of the Office 2007 Ribbon interface, Microsoft Office Open XML file formats, and the Web Site and Security Framework. These services provide a variety of business intelligence, unified communications and collaboration and content-management capabilities.

LOBi for SharePoint Server – which Microsoft is describing as "a future set of capabilities that will work together with Microsoft Office client applications and Office SharePoint Server 2007" – are more amorphous. Microsoft is promising to deliver a technical preview of LOBI by the end of calendar 2006.

By using OBA Services, application developers will be able to create applications similar to the "Duet" SAP-Microsoft application that the pair rolled out recently. Duet is a conglomeration of Microsoft Office on the front-end and SAP processes on the back-end.

"LOBi enables deep structured process integration with Office client applications, the ability for people to update transactional applications from within Microsoft Office, and the ability to more securely take structured business processes and data offline," according to Microsoft's definition of LOBi, which was part of a June 12 press release issued by Microsoft.

OBA Services and LOBi are both Office Business Application team deliverables. OBA is the Microsoft team charged with developing "strategies to increase the adoption of Microsoft's BI (business intelligence) platform and Microsoft Office in enterprise analytic applications," according to the company's Web site.

The OBA team introduced the week of June 4 a new business-intelligence server, known as Microsoft PerformancePoint.

OBA Services are the successor to Information Bridge Framework, integration technology that Microsoft debuted at TechEd 2004..

This article was originally published on microsoft-watch.com.

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