Right now I am in a long line of cars waiting to pass through from Canada to the US. The sign said there are delays... Since I have nothing better to do I think it's a good time to recap the first and my last day at the SAF conference. The conference goes through Friday but I had to leave early to care of some things in Seattle.
The first day went very well. We had a crowd that was exclusively architects and CTO's. Not all were Microsoft fans either. So that adds some nice creative tension, but what I like about it is the really challenging questions that get asked. These folks usually ask the not so obvious questions that stirs up conversation in both camps.
As everyone knows from reading my blog I am a fan of composite applications and enterprise architectures. The theme of the conference was user experience(UX), however behind the UX was a lot of discussion around composite applications and OBA's. I was very happy about that.
Javed Sikander, Director of Industry Architecture talked about the Office Business Applications results gap. He highlighted how OBA can help organization be more agile in an ever changing world.
My session was titled "OBA Examples" but it was more about OBA scenarios and walking through the loan origination architecture. I walked through what is and hat isn't an OBA. We walked through the architecture underpinnings of the OR-LOS solution including design decisions around WCF vs. BizTalk, InfoPath vs. WPF, MOSS vs. Smart Client, etc.
Sultan Akif presented on a MOSS 2007 case studies as well. So the first day we had three OBA presentations. Not too shabby.
