Office Business Applications

Now, ill tell more seriously in my blog. Its about Office Business Application, We call OBA. What is OBA? Why am i so interesting to tell it? Because i think this systems very useful.

This system uses Microsoft Application such as Word, Outlook, Excel. I think theyre familiar for many people (customer).

OBA are an emerging class of application that helps businesses unlock the value of their Line Of Business (a general term which often refers to a set of one or more highly related products which service a particular customer transaction or business need) systems and turn document-based processes into real applications
OBAs can be developed to meet a multitude of customer needs. For example, a company may want to:
– Extend its Line Of Business (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.

Architecture & Solution Overview


There are the following projects in the OBA solution:
¢ Database (folder) “ contains the database create and change scripts. See Setup instructions below on how to install the database. There are some small tweaks to the schema.
¢ DataService “WCF Data Service (formerly known as ADO.NET data services) exposes a Entity Framework Model via WCF-REST. This is how the Outlook Client, Excel Client, SharePoint Workflow & SharePoint Web Part communicate with the line-of-business (LOB) database.
¢ ExcelClient “ This is an Excel document customization that the shipping department uses to update the ship dates on orders through a data bound ListObject and view the order details in a task pane. It reads and updates order data through the service. It uses a WPF User Control in an ElementHost on a TaskPane. It also has a Simple Ribbon button for hiding/showing the task pane. This C# project also has some automation code that copies the spreadsheet as an embedded link to a Word Document. This shows the new C# code-focused features; Optional & Named Params, late binding with Dynamic object, and no PIAs. This makes Office development with C# now as easy as VB has always been.
¢ OutlookClient “ This is an Outlook Add-in for the sales reps that is used to pull up order history into an adjoining form region when reading email from customers. This is a WPF user control and its a built using the new drag-drop data binding & designer styling which you can now do without touching one line of XAML code. It also uses Open XML & VB XML literals to generate a new PO (Word document) based on a selected order from the history list so its easy for the sales reps to reorder items for customers. You can also use the Outlook client to send orders directly into the database if you want instead of sending them to a Sharepoint workflow. This makes the SharePoint piece optional.
¢ OrdersWorkflow (optional) “ This is a sequential list workflow that will run on the Orders document library in SharePoint. When a PO (word document) is added to the list, the workflow will kick off and parse the PO for the data and add it to the database via the data service using Open XML & VB XML literals. Once the order is added to the database the order status (property on the list item) is marked as Processing. The Workflow then goes into a wait state and polls the database (in the sample code this is every three minutes) until the order is shipped (ShippedDate is entered in the Excel client) and then the status changes to Shipped.
¢ LowInventoryWebPart (optional) “ This is a Visual Webpart that that displays the inventory information from the LOB database. You can also assign tasks directly from this web part. This project demonstrates how easy it is to build SharePoint visual web parts. If you are familiar with ASP.NET web forms development you can get up to speed very quickly.
¢ SilverlightTaskAdder (optional) “ This is a Silverlight project that uses the SharePoint Silverlight client assemblies to access SharePoint data. This piece is not actually part of the architecture diagram above but is cool to see how we could build a web part in Silverlight. 😉
¢ SilverlightDeploy (optional) “ This project contains a SharePoint Module that deploys the SilverLightTaskAdder.xap (output of the previous project) to an Apps document library. It can then be used in a web part on the site.

not how sophisticated the system, but how useful the system

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