Microsoft TechEd is underway in Beantown and Monday provided several intriguing announcements. Most notably were several announcements related to extending and opening the Microsoft apps to 3rd party components.
Office Systems 2007 will include a series of common services including:
- Business process/data repository
- Search
- Security components
- UI components
- Workflow
- XML file formats
Also discussed was a toolkit called LOBI (Line of Business Interoperability) as part of the upcoming version of Sharepoint Server. LOBI is supposed to expedite the process of integrating 3rd party apps functionality with Microsoft Office applications.
If both of these concepts sound vaguely familiar, it's because they're at the heart of Duet, Microsoft and SAP's joint development effort. When I met with Dennis Moore, he emphasized Microsoft's newfound willingness to publish its technical interfaces. Without those specifications, Duet wouldn't have been possible.
As I thought, both Microsoft and SAP have grand plans for the work they've done creating Duet that extend far beyond working together. SAP is leveraging other technologies (like Adobe and Macromedia) to add other types of UIs, and now Microsoft is pushing for non-SAP applications to be tightly integrated into its apps. Interesting times are ahead, hopefully we'll get more details on LOBI and Office Systems 2007 in the next few days.
For those that want to keep an eye on TechEd but can't be there, Microsoft has set up a blogging effort for several TechEd bloggers:
Note: At the time of this writing I, and/or funds I maintain discretionary control over, maintained long equity positions in MSFT and SAP.
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