At Microsoft India, we have been trying to raise security awareness in developers by sharing best practices for quite some time now. Yet, the lack of security knowledge is astounding, even on basic issues like password verification. So when I see a post like this one, it really makes me feel better! Thomas Ptacek talks about salted hashes, techniques of password breaking and how to counter them in a very easily understandable way. If you are a developer and are not 100% sure of your password verification scheme, please do read the post. If you want to know more about passwords, especially on Windows, read this excellent article by Jesper Johansson.
Sep 11, 2007
Sep 9, 2007
Do you know about OBA?
I've been away from the blogosphere for a almost three months now. June was spent planning and executing TechMela, Jul is the beginning of a new financial year at Microsoft and I was first taking a bit of break and then was heads down in FY08 planning. Since Aug beginning, I have been on the road, evangelizing Office Business Applications (OBA) - my new charge this year.
What is an OBA? It is not really a new concept - the idea is to access backend line of business (LOB) applications like ERP, CRM, SCM, Core Banking / Insurance applications via the Office Platform. Microsoft has been urging its customers and partners to adopt this approach for a pretty long time. Four years ago when I was responsible for our E-Biz stack (BizTalk, SPS and CMS) and Office 2003 was released, I had led several projects involving InfoPath talking to a SPS Doc Lib in turn integrating with a backend app via BizTalk. So what has changed with Office 2007? Technology-wise, the changes are incremental, but business strategy-wise the focus on backend integration is very strong, and that whole strategy is coming together under the brand name - Office Business Applications. This is a long term play for Microsoft and you would see us providing more and more capabilities on this going forward.
Now why is Microsoft so serious about this and why should you care? Javed Sikander provides a great coverage in his whitepaper - Building Office Business Applications: A New Breed of Business Applications Built on the 2007 Microsoft Office System and I would strongly urge you to read it to get the context on OBA. In brief:
- Companies spend a lot of time, effort and money to deploy backend LOB applications. Adoption of these applications however remains low because of user discomfort with the new (and often clunky) UI
- Even if the application is adopted by the users, it only fulfills the needs of task workers, knowledge workers however continue to do a lot of work outside these business apps which is mostly ad-hoc collaborative work involving spreadsheets, emails and word documents.
- This data remains locked in users' desktops and never captured by central IT, nor are the ad-hoc collaborations under the purview of central IT.
- Office Business Apps allow users to access backend apps via Office increasing user adoption and bringing the data locked in users' desktops and the collaborative processes back under Central IT.
Obviously this is huge value for a customer - OBAs not only increase the return on the investment in the backend apps, but also allow IT to capture organizational intelligence. ISVs who make the backend applications also like the OBA approach because this increases the adoption of their products and that helps increase the revenue they make. Finally, system integrators love OBAs because they make money on services required to integrate office with the backend apps. And yes of course OBAs are strategic to Microsoft because they increase the value of Office to the customers. This is what you call a win-win.
So which technologies are used to make OBAs? Top of the mind recall:
1) OpenXML allows embedding of LOB data in Office documents and allow server-side processing of Office docs which was cumbersome so far as it involved invoking the Office Apps on the server side which they are not really meant for
2) The Fluent UI allows creating custom Ribbon Tabs / Groups / Buttons and Custom Task Panes which can be used to provide contextual interfaces
3) InfoPath provides a forms interface which is available both as a standalone app as well as in the browser
4) WSS 3.0 and MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 provide workflow capabilities as they host Workflow Foundation. The workflows can be created using SharePoint Designer as well as Visual Studio
5) MOSS Search provides enterprise search across websites, fileshares, mail servers, business data and extensiblity mechanisms to index custom file formats (using IFilters) and custom content locations (using Protocol Handlers)
6) Excel Services provide a server-side equivalent to Excel including a web interface and a web-services API
7) The Business Data Catalog in MOSS is used to model applications inside MOSS and surface LOB data inside MOSS which can then be consumed in Search, Business Data Web Parts and custom applications
8) Enterprise Content Management capabilities in MOSS
9) MOSS itself provides a highly scalable server side composite apps platform which can be used in organizations of all sizes.
What have we been doing about OBAs in India? A lot - we were fortunate to have Javed Sikander visiting India in Aug and while he was here, we did a couple of Architect Roundtables, met several large partners all of whom are very excited about OBAs for the reasons I outlined above and spoke with Press to help raise awareness on OBAs. We also did a webcast series on OBAs and conducted a couple of workshops. Now in Sep, we are going on the road once again talking about Enterprise apps and Office Business Apps. In the coming months, we would be conducitng a number of sessions and posting a whole lot of content on OBAs. Stay tuned!
