Attendees gathered at the fifth annual Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference today, where the company shared its vision and road map to simplify the effort required to design, build, deploy and manage composite applications within and across organizations. Microsoft Corp. announced “Oslo,” the code name for the set of technical investments that help customers realize this vision.

This multiyear, multiproduct effort utilizes the company’s top engineering talent to build on the model-driven and service-enabled principles of Microsoft Dynamic IT (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jun07/06-04TechED07PR.mspx) and extend the benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) beyond the firewall. The “Oslo” technology innovations further Microsoft software-plus-services efforts by providing extensions to the application platform to help developers bridge between on-premise and off-premise projects. As part of a technical road map, Microsoft made available new tools and guidance to help organizations take advantage of “real-world SOA” today, including new SOA resources from Microsoft and a host of industry partners.

Today, applications cannot easily span the boundaries between technologies, between business and IT, and between an organization, its suppliers and its customers. Microsoft’s continued investments in SOA and business-process management (BPM) technologies will help customers better connect across these boundaries using a service-oriented and model-driven approach. As part of “Oslo,” Microsoft will work to deliver a unified platform integrating services and modeling, moving from a world where models describe the application to a world where models are the application.

At the conference today, Microsoft also demonstrated an upcoming community technology preview of Microsoft BizTalk Services (http://labs.biztalk.net/default.aspx), featuring additional support for interoperability, Web 2.0 services, identity standards and workflow in the cloud.