Office 2010 Home And Student Microsoft recruits ve

Microsoft is stepping up its campaign to obtain extra independent software program vendors to integrate Workplace front-ends with their own organization programs.There already exist many these Office-front-ended programs — which Microsoft has christened Workplace Business Programs, or OBAs. Some are commercial programs, like the jointly developed Microsoft-SAP Duet. Others are custom-built proprietary applications, via which a organization mashes up Workplace with its personal line-of-business application,Office 2010 Pro Plus Key, for in-house use.Microsoft officials are claiming there are already “hundreds” of ISVs building and deploying OBAs,Office 2010 Professional Plus, in spite of the fact that Microsoft has done relatively little to date, at least formally, to build the OBA community. Companies have built Office and SharePoint mashups with Epicor, Siebel, PeopleSoft and Pivotal, Microsoft officials said.At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference on July 10, Microsoft announced its new OBA OnRamp plan,Office 2010 Home And Student, designed to get much more software vendors and systems integrators build more OBAs. Microsoft will provide participants in the program with sales, marketing, consulting and technical help. They will provide them with OBA Quickstart kits — copies of which Microsoft is distributing to all 12,000 attendees of this week;s partner show to help jumpstart their programs. Microsoft also plans to allow OBA OnRamp partners to advertise their solutions on Microsoft;s new OBACentral Web site.A related aside: OBAs encompass additional than just Workplace plus some back-end application. Some OBAs also are a mash-up of SharePoint with another back-end application.Microsoft recently launched a new SharePoint resources mash-up site designed to encourage additional partners to make use of SharePoint;s enterprise search and other capabilities. Microsoft is encouraging developers to think about doing a lot more SharePoint-inclusive composite applications, like new enterprise dashboards and mash-ups “where a new organization capability is created by assembling multiple existing software assets: web services,Windows 7 Home Premium Product Key, APIs, web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom),Office Pro 2007 Key, gadgets, and screen scraping (and) where content is sourced from APIs, Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom), gadgets, web services and screen scraping.”Anyone — other than Mike Cox (who I am sure has built a number of an OBA currently) — tried mashing up Office with a back-end app? Any interest in doing so?