Composite applications
by
Charlie Bess
Last week, I was at Microsoft Tech Ed and was able to see the current state of Microsoft technologies. One of the things that I found most interesting was not specifically a product, but more the state of composite application development using Microsoft Office and SharePoint.
It really made me wonder about the percentage of application development efforts that could (should?) be accomplished using the ability to mash-up an application using inherent capabilities embedded within the Office suite. In the past, I've written about the changes in IT that will take place when we move from a custom creation to a delayed assembly foundation for generating value. This looks to me like a significant step along that path.
Composite application creation has been talked about for a long time, but with the advent of MOSS, it has definitely reached a whole new level. How many organizations are going to plan for this or stumble into it the way most organizations stumbled into supporting hundreds (or even thousands) of solutions developed in Access?
The nice thing is that composite applications should have the agility of end-user assembled solutions, but with a much greater capability to the IT organization to back it up and maintain it.
With PerformancePoint, the ability to display the status of the environment and the business value developed should be relatively easy to demonstrate as well (when the product is released later this year).
The productivity and capability for applications where this technique is applicable, will be hard to argue against.
