I don’t want to steal any thunder from the authors who helped put this book together, but before you get underway I just want to help set the stage for this book by giving you a glimpse of what’s to come.

Office Business Applications (OBAs) are a new type of composite application that integrate line-of-business (LOB) systems (such as SAP, PeopleSoft, and Microsoft Dynamics) to Office, whether it be the client (for example, extending the Excel 2007 Ribbon) or the server [for example, integrating an SAP Web service with the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Business Data Catalog (BDC)]. OBAs are an important new development in the realm of enterprise solutions development. They enable companies to leverage the rich Office platform to build composite solutions that bring information workers closer to the business data that helps them in their everyday work. This is, as you’ll see as you read this book, quite a high-level representation of the problem that OBAs solve, but it drives at the heart of why organizations would want to build and implement OBAs: a) to better leverage the large-scale LOB systems they pay quite a lot of money to implement and sustain, and b) to ensure the data in these systems is available (in real time) to the people who need it (what is often called the "results gap").

As you might imagine, "Office platform" encompasses not only a lot of the development technology that Microsoft has to offer, but also a lot of options for the developer and the OBA solutions the developer can build using that technology—many of which are covered in this book. This is both exciting and arguably overwhelming, thus necessitating the need for not only books like this but other related support mechanisms for the developer (see Additional Resources later in this section for one such list of related resources). It also necessitates the IT organization as a whole asking a different question, and that is, "How can we best leverage the tools and applications we have in our environment today?" I think one of the underlying themes of this book—leveraging the Office system and the Office platform to build and deploy OBAs that bridge the results gap—will help answer this question, as each of the chapters illustrates how the developer can use the myriad components of the Office platform to help build OBAs for his or her organization.