Office Live

I was talking to one of the Office Live guys a few weeks ago about some possible scenarios on how to leverage Office Live and what else but lending came to mind. :) Since we are talking about lending I thought I would keep this as a long running scenario for discussions on my blog.

The first question I usually get when it comes to Office Live is these applications are OBAs or not. Alone it is not. What is hosted in the cloud is Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). But if you add an Office Client and LOB system in the back-end then you just might have an OBA on Office Live.

So what would this look like. Lets look at our lending process. In the OBA RAP for Loan Origination Systems we show the lenders perspective, but what about the Broker and the applications he or she may use. A broker typically has a Point of Sale system that manages their loan pipeline. What would the architecture look like if we put the POS in the cloud? 

What you see above is another flavor of OBA. We are moving a thick client up to the cloud by building a set of input forms on Office Live. We are able to manage customer pipelines, contacts, corporate e-mail, etc. This is integrated to a preferred lender through XML web services. You may see something familiar back on the lending side.

This is a very simple scenario but very valid for the industry. What we have effectively done is allowed for small companies (brokers) to off-load the support and costs on the desktop and moved them to the cloud on an infrastructure that they do not have to manage. Since Office Live can support some level of coding and web services leveraging more robust back-ends makes this a viable solution for small business.  Obviously this also applies to many other small companies as well.

Keep an eye out we are building this as a reference application.