Microsoft went public on Monday with its end-to-end business-intelligence (BI) strategy. But company officials still aren't talking much about the team charged with implementing its BI strategy, or what the next deliverables from that team will be.

That team, the Office Business Applications (OBA) group, is the Microsoft entity formerly known as the "Business Intelligence Applications" team. OBA is run by Lewis Levin, the Microsoft Corporate VP in charge of business intelligence.

The charter of OBA (according to Microsoft's Web site): To develop "strategies to increase the adoption of Microsoft's BI platform and Microsoft Office in enterprise analytic applications. The group's goal is to enable Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Office to bridge the gulf between enterprise data sources and the information workers who need to view and analyze business information, plan and make decisions, and collaborate with others."

"We're charged with unifying sales and marketing across Microsoft's BI products," said Chris Caren, the general manager of OBA.

Caren said his division is focusing increasingly on extracting data from line-of-business applications, as opposed to targeting the more traditional kind of business intelligence (BI) products and technologies.

The apps from which the data is being extracted include not only Microsoft's own products, like Office and the recently rebranded Microsoft Dyanmics ERP/CRM wares, but also third-party line-of-business software, Caren said. Microsoft will rely on the adapters for SQL Server 2005 to access data from non-Microsoft products, he said.

OBA is the unit behind "Mendocino," the technology under joint development by Microsoft and SAP, which is designed to link SAP's back-end processes with Microsoft Office. An early beta of Mendocino is due later this year. Microsoft has declined to talk about final ship targets for the technology, which will be packaged and sold by both Microsoft and SAP.

OBA also is the team driving Maestro, the server-based Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 product application that Microsoft plans to ship on November 1.

Caren said OBA's focus is to "build an Office strategy for business intelligence" that is especially focused on exposing business intelligence to end users.

"We're building out business-intelligence resources in the Information Worker division," Caren explained. "Business intelligence is not a mainstream technology yet. Our goal is to make it more accessible through Office, especially Excel, Outlook and Sharepoint."

There is a difference between what OBA is doing and what's cooking with the SQL Server team -- which also is focused heavily on making a full slate of business-intelligence tools available to users, Caren said.

"We (OBA) are more about managing outcomes than about analyzing historical data," he said.

What's up next for OBA?

Sources close to Microsoft said that OBA is developing a product code-named Biz# that will be complementary to Microsoft's Business Scorecard Manager. Biz# will be more of a financial-management server, however, sources said.

One source described Biz# as "a tool that facilitates the display and development of analytics for various data sources."

"Biz# is another product in my group. We are not yet talking about that," Caren said. "But we won't stop with scorecarding on what BI will look like."

Biz# isn't the only future project on OBA's plate. Caren acknowledged that Microsoft is already planning for future Mendocino releases.

"While the first release of Mendocino doesn't relate to Maestro (Business Scorecard Manager), we could add extensions to Mendocino for business scorecarding later," he said.

Caren's team also will be charged with positioning the "Business Intelligence Portal" functionality that Microsoft is making part of both the SharePoint Portal Server version 3.0 (timed to coincide with the rest of the Office 12 family) and the next release SharePoint Portal Services that Microsoft is integrating into Windows.

Sources said that Microsoft is looking at ways of bundling its various BI deliverables, including Maestro, Biz#, various Office 12 server, SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services, into a single "business intelligence suite" bundle. On Monday, Caren said he was not prepared to talk packaging, but did not deny such a bundle was under consideration.

(This article includes information which originally appeared in the May 12, 2005, issue of the Microsoft Watch newsletter. Want to see what other Microsoft news nuggets you might have missed? Sign up today for a free two-week trial subscription to Microsoft Watch.)