Recently I've been doing a "tour of the trenches", helping a major client with their web-based applications for the Insurance industry. It's taught me that there's a lot of development work that goes on in companies that doesn't relate to the overall aim of delivering business value through software, specifically around the building of "platforms".  Brad Abrams noted something similar when he went on his road trip, there are a lot of companies building custom platforms.

From my experience a lot of these platforms turn out badly since most companies can't afford the time or money to build and create successful platforms.  Rather than writing platforms, I'm looking for ways to use Other Peoples' Code to build solutions that deliver better business value.  At TechEd this week I'm interested in evaluating Office 2007, and particularly the server platform, as a platform to build on.

Looking at the domain of Insurance applications it's easy to see why lots of developers want to write a platform.  The basic flow is similar in structure to many other types of financial trading:

• An application form, with one or more wizard-like pages, containing controls with single- and cross-field validation.
• The application form is sent to a rating engine (usually authored by Underwriters) which determines whether the business will generate a quote and if so, what the value of that quote is.
• After a quote is generated there are various sequential and state-based workflows around that can occur (e.g. accepting the quote, revising the quote, "binding" the quote to make it a policy).

With that in mind I'm currently looking at Office Server 2007 as a possible platform to build on.  Here's a sketch of what I'm looking:

• Create the application form in InfoPath (giving me the single- and cross-field validation), then publish it as a HTML form using Office Forms Server (there was a session at PDC as well).
• Use Excel Services to host the spreadsheet that contains all of the logic for calculating the Quote.  Once we agree on a set of named cells/ranges in the spreadsheet, the underwriters can keep control of it.
• Use SharePoint's support for Workflow to implement the Workflow.

Obviously I'm just sketching at this stage (I still have questions about licensing, performance and flexibility are key) and I need to do some prototyping, but overall I'm interested in the possibility of being able to build basic Insurance trading applications on top of Office 2007 as a platform, dramatically reducing the amount of code I will need to write.

I'm currently pondering whether the new server-side capability of Excel 2007 could radically change the face of many financial application.  Excel is so widely used in finance that many companies could describe it as their platform.  I'm currently involved in writing a web application for a group who use Excel extensively and I frequently think if we could work more harminously with this spreadsheet we could build the application for much lower cost but equal or higher business value.

In the keynote last night they demonstrated the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 running Excel Services to perform Monte Carlo simulations using Microsoft Excel.  Initially I thought this was implausible, imagining the response if someone asked, "Can we set up a cluster server in order to run my Excel spreadsheets?", but on reflection I think this could make a great deal of sense.  Even though I'm suspicious about the efficiency of this kind of solution, viewed from a different perspective I think it could represent great business value. 

It's amazing to think that Windows and Office could lead to a scenario where a front-office trader could write software that can be executed in a cluster - an arena that previously seemed the domain of C++ and hard-core developers.  On the one hand it scares me, since there will be less custom C# development for me to do, but on the other hand I like it a lot since re-writing functionality that Excel already implements takes a long time and doesn't give as big a "bang for the buck".

Obviously I need to do a lot more research on Excel Services.  There's a good introduction here and some more technical details on how you can call Excel through web services.

TechEd Boston started Sunday night with Ray Ozzie admonishing us that there's a 'Services Disruption' coming and proposing the slightly tongue-twisting 'Client Server Service Synergy' (and the lesser-used companion phrase 'Client Server Service Symmetry') as the way forward, with Microsoft offering more services in future. 

Ray with the usual dramatic structure of a presentation (much like what is recommended in the "beyond bullets" book), setting up that we're heading for a new disruption in the way that we work.  He did the standard mainframe -> mini computers -> micro computers -> client/server -> the internet ("the mother of all disruptions") -> peer-peer set of disruptions, personalised through his own life experiences with Lotus Notes and Groove. There was the standard argument that we need to be on the lookout for new disruptions.

The drivers that are changing things for today are the promise of multiprocessors (32 to 1000 CPUs inside a single machine - up to "oodles" in Ray's words) the reduction in storage space and the growing ubiquity of bandwidth.  The interesting point that Ray highlighted was the fact that in the past it was research and corporate environments that drove datacentres, whereas today these were being driven by experience with consumer market through search, advertising and consumer shopping sites.  Ray's point was that the benefits of investments in these environments will be felt more widely.

He wasn't terribly specific about how this would happen, though he was trying to position Microsoft's approach as a mix between the client services approach and external services in a "client server service synergy".  He showed windows desktop search searching over the internet, SharePoint sites and the local machine as example of this.  He also showed Microsoft Dynamics using 'business mashups' with Windows Live virtual earth.  He also mentioned the online/offline architecture of Groove.  There was much mention of the Windows Live set of products.  There was a Windows Live Identity that I hadn't heard of before - I'm assuming it's a rename of Passport? It might have been the jetlag but it felt like another moment of marketing fatigue (apparently MOM will become System Server Operations Manager as well).

The presentation hall felt very much like an aircraft hangar and the regular sound of planes overhead reinforced this.  Ray was the first keynote speaker I've seen wearing a suit jacket on one of these talks.  Obviously the chip-implant wasn't powerful enough to convert him to the standard casual 'uniform' of a blue shirt and a pair of chinos.