SAP and Microsoft Make Duet
Twelve months after first unveiling plans to create “Project Mendocino” — a joint product that enables people to interact quickly and easily with SAP business processes and data through Microsoft® Office applications — SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) and Microsoft Corp. today announced that the two companies are scheduled to ship the product on time in June, 2006. The product is officially named Duet software for Microsoft Office and SAP.
According to dictionary.com Duet is
n.
- Music.
a. A composition for two voices or two instruments.
b. A group of two singers or two instrumentalists.- A pair.
Two voices SAP and Microsoft produced their first product Duet. They will also market and sell Duet jointly. To do so they launched a new website for their pretty product: duet.com.
What is Duet?
Duet is simply an integration program between Microsoft Office programs and SAP R/3. Since it is an integration program, it must be used a technology to communicate two different programs. I guess XML technology has been used. Indeed Shai Agassi, president of SAP’s product and technology group and an executive board member, said
The integration between the applications is done using XAML, an XML-based user interface design language.
What is XAML?
Let me go to search engines. Wow there is a website called xaml.net and it says:
XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language, pronounced, ‘ZAML’) is an XML based Markup language developed by Microsoft. XAML (A serialization format) allows one to express an object model using XML. XAML, combined with Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), is one of the primary pillars in WinFX; the next generation of Graphics and Internet Services Technology.
“developed by Microsoft” So it is not a standard. It seems it is only for Windows platform. It is ordinary since Microsoft Office for Windows.
Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP version 1.0
It has four scenarios:
- Budget monitoring: Gives managers seamless access to the financial data they need to make better decisions.
- Time management: Enables employees to record work and billable hours using their Microsoft Office Outlook® calendar, and automatically synchronizes and updates Outlook appointments with mySAP ERP, the SAP application for enterprise resource planning (ERP).
- Leave management: Enables employees to submit personal leave requests and handle management approvals processes through Outlook, thereby enabling data synchronization and process compliance between the desktop and mySAP ERP.
- Organization management: Allows employees and managers to access organization information and HR-related tasks in the familiar Outlook environment.
It is obvious that it is only for SAP HR module. If a company that uses SAP HR and Microsoft Office, Duet can be used.
For example, the product allows an end user to submit vacation requests and update and access employee HR files by pulling SAP data into Microsoft Excel. Meanwhile, the data on the desktop is in sync with the data on the server.
Using Duet, workers will be able to perform business tasks such as monitoring budgets, tracking billable hours, managing vacation schedules, and conducting performance reviews from within Microsoft Outlook while pulling data from SAP’s business apps. In a recent demonstration, SAP showed Duet’s ability to set up special folders in Outlook that let multiple workers subscribe to reports from SAP apps. A vacation scheduling app lets users report hours worked with Outlook’s calendar user interface. Duet’s budget monitoring tool features a right-hand task bar in Outlook that shows graphs and charts of project budgets–and lets managers view the impact of moving funds among projects by dragging and dropping information among those graphs. A forthcoming travel app will let employees search for flights and hotels, submit requests to managers, and book approved travel in SAP’s accounting software.
Future Plans for Next Duet Versions (Expanded Product Roadmap)
In the second half of 2006, SAP and Microsoft plan to offer two value packs for Duet, providing additional business scenario support, enhanced platform capabilities and language support. These value packs will expose five additional scenarios in the Microsoft Office system coming from mySAP ERP and mySAP Business Suite applications for customer relationship management (CRM) and supplier relationship management (SRM). The scenarios are:
- recruitment management,
- travel management,
- analytics,
- purchasing management,
- sales activity management.
With these value packs, capabilities of Duet will go beyond self-service for employees and managers to enable line-of-business operational efficiencies and cost savings. The value packs are designed for compatibility with the next release of mySAP ERP and the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system and will expand language support to include English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Japanese.
It will be expanded through the other products and modules of SAP: HR, MM, SD, CRM, SRM…
System Requirements
System Requirements—Server
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or higher
- Microsoft Windows .NET Framework 2.0 or higher
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or higher
- SAP Composite Application Framework Runtime
- mySAP™ ERP 2004 or higher
System Requirements—Client
- Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Enterprise Edition
- Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional or higher
- Microsoft Windows .NET Framework 2.0 or higher
Therefore, do you want to use Duet? Do not be hurry! Look at requirements: Server and Client. Upgrade your Microsoft products, upgrade your SAP products. Are you ready? All right you can start to make Duet right now! Enjoy! What a nice marketing strategy! How many SAP customers are there and SAP users in those companies? Imagine the profit!
How much is it?
New software called Duet, which debuts June 28 and costs at least $125 per PC that runs it, is intended for large companies that want to tie business data from SAP’s (nyse: SAP - news - people ) accounting, HR and inventory software systems to Microsoft’s (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) ubiquitous Outlook e-mail program. Duet, formerly code-named “Mendocino”, should later be able to siphon data to other Office applications, including Excel.
125$ per PC or per SAP user… It doesn’t seem as a big deal for rich SAP user companies. If you have 1000 users, total cost is 125.000$.Is it going to be license model or subscription model? Do we need to compare the price of all Microsoft Office programs? After Duet 1.0, what is going to be upgrade cost to next version? Maybe SAP user companies “wait and see” to reduce the cost!
Shai Agassi said
The potential financial impact from Duet to SAP is “huge.” In most SAP customer accounts, almost all end users work with Office, but far fewer use SAP applications directly.
We have the potential ability to grow fourfold by looking at the number of employees in a corporation versus the number of users that are professional users of SAP.
Some concerns about Duet 1.0 (integration program)…
It is used XAML. It is kind of XML technology, it is just extended! It seems that the user will do an action in a Microsoft Office program which runs on desktop, client like SAP GUI. Then the data, process will go on SAP, server. I am wondering what kind of method is being used to post; enter data to SAP database, tables. Did they use direct access to SAP tables to insert or update data? Maybe but I don’t think so! When you make integration in an SAP platform, you can not insert or update database tables directly. Use BAPIs, RFC function modules, Idocs… Probably after action in a Microsoft Office program a background job is triggered in SAP, then update process. But it is inevitable that there might be some problems to update date. The user should be informed about that and manual action is required. What I am trying to say is Duet is not a part of SAP, it is an external stuff. So performance, usability, extra jobs must be thought before implementing it. For example who’s going to handle integration problems between Microsoft Office programs and SAP?
The other thing SAP has an SAP Office module. It looks like Outlook, inbox, calendar, tasks, etc… I used and made some programs to use SAP Office for different issues.
I guess it might be thought Duet is for non-SAP users, it means for Microsoft users… But does it work like that?
References
- SAP - SAP and Microsoft Introduce Duet™ Software, Bringing Together the Worlds of Productivity and Enterprise Applications
- Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP
- Forbes - Gates’ Microsoft Sings Duet With SAP
- SearchSAP.com - Microsoft, SAP to release Mendocino as Duet, unveil Web site
- InformationWeek - Microsoft And SAP To Deliver New ‘Duet’ Software In June
- Microsoft Download Center - Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP Product Datasheet
- SAP - Duet: Bringing Together Business Productivity and Enterprise Applications