There have been countless discussions on how consumer expectations set by Web 2.0 are being transferred to the workplace. Based on working with Web 2.0, users increasingly expect to exert more control over their work experiences and to participate in them. They expect business applications to adjust to the way they work, rather than accept a suboptimal experience. This we know.

Ultimately, Web 2.0 is not really about the technology. It's about social networks and users' control of their experience. The way to achieve this movement of power to the end user in the enterprise is through a composite solution that meshes software, services and the web and considers the business user as well as the developer.

Composite applications are the business users' equivalent of Web 2.0 and mash-ups. They provide a mechanism for multiple technology vendors to participate in a solution that, in its simplest form, decouples information from line-of-business (LOB) applications like CRM or ERP and surfaces it in a more usable way.

The traditional challenge for many businesses creating these types of composite applications lays with the LOB application vendors themselves. The proprietary construction of legacy systems makes it difficult to extract information and deposit it in a new place. In addition, LOB vendors have also been wary of surrendering the control they have over business information by allowing it to be exported to other systems. But this is changing.

Many LOB vendors have started to re-architect legacy systems into a set of loosely joined, modular capabilities based on service-oriented concepts. This has enabled them to participate at a deeper level in the "composition" space by making the information in their systems more available to external applications.

The next step in this process is for both legacy and new product developers to embrace interoperability initiatives and technologies within their solutions. When the loosely joined capabilities described above are not only built in a modular way but also using standard building blocks that enable information to be shared from day one, we will see a much faster uptake of composite applications in the enterprise. In addition, we will also likely see composite applications that are capable of more complex analysis than simply taking existing information and presenting it in a new way.

Ultimately developers should consider adopting a strategy to make as many of their products as possible inter-operable by design. By basing products on standard technologies like XML or web services, developers are essentially agreeing on a common "contract" for how their applications can communicate and exchange data with one another. This is critical for building composite software plus service applications, and it can only be good for customers.

Microsoft - together with other platform developers - has a vested commercial interest in providing development platforms that can be used to create these composite applications. It makes sense that the platforms are as interoperable as possible to ensure developers are unconstrained when creating new composite applications and services, because it means they can add value to their internal enterprise customers a lot faster.

There is little doubt that with the continued growth of Web 2.0 in the consumer space, demand for composite applications in enterprises will rise. With its importance in an increasingly interconnected computing landscape already secure, interoperability is emerging as the key to making Web 2.0 truly transferable to the corporate environment.

Greg Stone is Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Australia.