- Posted by acxede on August 4, 2008
A Business Application, in Office Live Small Business terminology, is a mini web-site. It allows you to store data as well as documents, collaborate with your co-workers and clients, and share information with them.
A Business Application is a customized framework of lists, libraries, and web parts put together to address a specific business need. An expense application, for instance, may contain a custom list for recording expenses and a document library for storing supporting documents.
You can save the blueprint of an application as a template. Subsequently, you can create – or provision, as Microsoft likes to call it – a copy of the application from the template. Office Live Small Business comes with several built-in application templates. In fact, Microsoft automatically provisions three applications for you when it creates your Office Live Small Business account – Contact Manager, Team Workspace, and Document Manager.
You can create any number of copies of a Business Application. Let’s say your business is structured as three teams: Sales, Administration, and Production. Naturally, the pre-provisioned Team Workspace won’t cut muster; you’ll need two more Team Workspaces. Sure enough, you can create two more copies of the Team Workspace application and customize Office Live Small Business for the specific needs of your business.
Office Live Small Business boasts roughly 30 pre-built Business Applications that address a wide variety of business needs such as tracking expenses, managing contacts, tracking company assets, scheduling meetings, collaborating on documents, and monitoring the progress of a project. You can even build your own applications or buy them from third parties.
Although every Business Application has its own unique structure, ultimately they all are built upon only a few types of SharePoint objects. Therefore they have much in common. Once you master one Business Application, working with the others is quite intuitive.
Applications and workspaces are built with the following SharePoint objects.
A list, in Office Live Small Business terminology, is a database table. Its purpose is to store structured data. The elements in a list, which are analogous to columns in a table, are called list items. An employee list, for example, might contain list items such as the employee id, name, address, and salary. You can create a custom list or you can customize one of Office Live Small Business’s pre-defined lists – announcements, contacts, events, links, and tasks.
A view is named collection of list items from one or more lists. You can choose the list items you want to see from the list(s) of your choice and select the order in which you want them to appear. You can even apply display styles, summarize or aggregate list items, and paginate your views to generate custom reports.
A library, sometimes called a document library, is for storing unstructured data as documents of various kinds. It’s a sophisticated document repository. You can check-in and check-out documents from a library and monitor their versions.
An alert is e-mail notification that Office Live Small Business generates when a list, library, or document changes. You might receive an alert when someone updates a document you’re monitoring.
A workflow is an automatic movement of list items and documents when a user takes a series of business process-related actions.
A web part is reusable block of information. It consists of a frame, a title bar and a content area. It’s like a miniature dynamic web page that you can embed in another.
A business application is a web site that’s built with lists, views, libraries, and other SharePoint-based objects in Office Live Small Business. You can manage and share structured information with business applications.
Like a business application, a workspace is also a web site that’s built with lists, views, libraries, and other SharePoint-based objects in Office Live Small Business but its purpose is to collaborate on documents and projects rather than work with structured information.
A template is a blueprint of a business application or a workspace. A template contains definitions of all Office Live Small Business objects that make up the application or workspace. Templates allow you to clone applications and workspaces. If you conduct meetings in a certain way, you could build a meeting workspace to suit your needs and template it. Then you can create a new meeting workspace for each new meeting from the template without having to define content of the workspace all over again.