The Office Business Applications (OBAs) Composition Reference Toolkit reveals the underlying composition capabilities of the Microsoft Office system. It integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft Office system to enable a prescriptive, application-composition experience for information workers. These information workers can then go on to build and deploy OBAs by using semantically related OBA components such as workflows; document libraries, lists, and pages in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; Web parts; client add-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO); business intelligence (BI) reports; BI dashboards; and so on. The Toolkit contains a Microsoft OBA Composition Server and an OBA Composer. The OBA Composition Server includes metadata, administration, and provisioning services to enable cataloging of OBA components, administering and managing components, defining semantic relationships between components, defining the bindings between components and line-of-business systems, and to support the deployment of OBAs that users have composed by using the components.

Version 2.0 (V2) of the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit evolves the Version 1.0 release of the Toolkit to add IT administration capabilities integrated into the SharePoint Central Administration portal, a prescriptively secure user experience for OBA composition, and incremental deployment of OBAs. The V2 release also provides support for installing the OBA Composer on a client computer that is running the Windows Vista operating system and connecting to a remote computer that is running Office SharePoint Server. The release provides support for many new, out-of-the-box components, too, which cover scenarios that pertain to Expense Reporting, Purchase Requisition Management, Financial Services, and Health & Life Sciences solutions.

The V2 release also includes the source code (framework, tools, and sample components) of the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit to enable independent software vendors (ISVs) and solution integrators to extend and repurpose the Toolkit to suit their individual needs.