Office Business Applications: Financial Services

  • Article

Some time ago I was working as a consultant and most of my projects were related to financial services. Today I can identify a lot of business opportunities for the banking industry that you can address using different combinations of Office clients, servers, tools, and services.

Most solutions involve using MOSS for the presentation and services layer of a banking solution. The MOSS platform provides a rich application-services layer that enables many reusable services for your enterprise's SOA. These services include, but are not limited to Enterprise Content Management, Workflow, Digital Rights Management, Enterprise Search, Business Data Catalog, InfoPath Forms Services, Excel Services, and more.

The following diagram represents the conceptual architecture of a loan application solution built as an Office Business Application:

 

You can connect different Office programs, tools and technologies depending on what you are trying to accomplish. You can use Visual Studio Tools for Office, the Extensible UI (Fluent Ribbon and Custom Task Panes) and the Office Open XML Formats to bring together different building blocks to create a custom financial services OBA. 

The loan application solution not only takes advantage of MOSS built-in features, but also integrates Outlook 2007 and Excel 2007 to build a richer presentation layer for the user. You can learn more details about this sample solution reading the Financial Services OBA article by Mike Walker.

If you are interested in learning more about OBA Financial Services, here are some other resources you might find useful.

  • MSDN offers more resources than can help you get started to model business solutions for the banking industry. You should keep an eye on the following webcast tomorrow:

Building Compelling Financial Applications with VSTO 2005 SE and Excel Services

Tuesday, February 20, 2007 1:00 – 2:30 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)  

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/Register.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032320963&CountryCode=US

With the release of 2007 Microsoft Office System clients, servers, and tools, Microsoft delivers a true application platform that can be used to create collaborative, role-based, easy-to-use solutions that extend the traditional line-of-business (LOB) applications and enterprise systems. In this webcast we will review two important building blocks of the extensibility and programmability of the 2007 Microsoft Office System: Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition (VSTO 2005 SE) and Microsoft Excel Services. These building blocks enable architects and developers to build a new breed of services-based, composite applications known as Office Business Applications. This session will show how you can leverage your existing skills and company's investments in Office to build compelling applications.