Microsoft Office Professional 2010 Microsoft recru

Microsoft is stepping up its campaign to obtain far more independent software vendors to integrate Office front-ends with their very own company programs.There already exist various these Office-front-ended programs — which Microsoft has christened Office Small business Applications, or OBAs. Some are commercial programs, like the jointly developed Microsoft-SAP Duet. Others are custom-built proprietary programs, via which a organization mashes up Workplace with its personal line-of-business application, for in-house use.Microsoft officials are claiming there are already “hundreds” of ISVs building and deploying OBAs, in spite of the fact that Microsoft has done relatively little to date, at least formally, to build the OBA community. Companies have built Workplace 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 system, designed to obtain a lot more software program vendors and systems integrators build extra OBAs. Microsoft will provide participants in the system with sales, marketing, consulting and technical help. They will provide them with OBA Quickstart kits — copies of which Microsoft is distributing to all 12,Microsoft Office Professional 2010,000 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 more 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 a lot more partners to make use of SharePoint;s enterprise search and other capabilities. Microsoft is encouraging developers to think about doing far more SharePoint-inclusive composite applications, like new small business dashboards and mash-ups “where a new business capability is created by assembling multiple existing software program assets: web services, APIs, web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom), 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 numerous an OBA currently) — tried mashing up Office with a back-end app? Any interest in doing so?