Managing Automation - December 2007 - (Page 49) place with Office 2003, which required extensions to enable communication with SAP. Since then, Microsoft has rolled out Office 2007, which is designed with integration in mind. It is built around the concept of Microsoft Office Business Applications (OBA), which is not a product, but rather a category of emerging applications. “It’s the notion of putting human resources scenarios, time management, lead management, and project time tracking directly in an Outlook interface instead of having to go to another Web application,” says Chris Bryant, Microsoft’s senior product manager for the Office plat“There’s a category of users we call ‘information form. Of fice 2007 workers.’ They are the decision-makers workincorporates new ing on business processes and they use Office services, such as a workflow engine, in more than anything else.”— Nir Kol of SAP an XML file format tionally it has been isolated and disconnected that the regular end user can access. “By comfrom line-of-business systems. Accessing inforbining the power of the ubiquitous Microsoft Ofmation in any ERP, CRM, or BI system has meant fice system with ERP, CRM, or SCM on the back logging into a separate application, which, to the end it unlocks more value from the line-of-busiaverage user, has an unfamiliar interface. Typiness application by making it more accessible cally, only a handful of people in an organization and actionable,” Bryant says. This is what he dehave direct access to the back-end systems. But as scribes as “the next level of productivity.” more manufacturers embrace the idea of integraMicrosoft is delivering an OBA for its Dytion between the plant and the enterprise, it is namics ERP application, as well as its Perforbecoming increasingly clear that seamless conmancePoint BI portfolio — a product suite that nectivity within the enterprise must happen first. Skanska’s Emerick has spent a lot of time beta testing and is now implementing. “We’ve had NEW OFFICE RELATIONSHIPS components of Microsoft business intelligence For a company to change its business processes, for some time but what’s been lacking is a access to information must change. That was comprehensive platform to bring together the the driving concept behind the Duet project, an front end with the business processes,” he says. agreement inked in 2004 between Microsoft and Similarly, Duet user Resource Informatik, a SAP to integrate the Office environment capabilities — be they calendaring, contact management, or demand planning — with the data in the underlying system of record. “There’s a category of users we call ‘information workers,’ and they are not the typical SAP users,” says Nir Kol, SAP’s vice president for the Duet program. “They are not the subject-matter experts that are task-oriented and updating on day-to-day financial or HR systems. Rather, they are the decision-makers working on business processes, and they use Office more than anything else.” Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP, which began shipping last year, was the result of one of the first formal agreements to tie a large-scale enterprise application into the Microsoft Office technology stack. The collaboration took the information stuck in Excel. It wants to marry the comfort of the Excel interface with the powerful analytics of business intelligence (BI) applications. What it doesn’t want is a separate system that requires importing and exporting data or needs an IT expert to interpret the data. The goal is to “bring BI to the masses,” Emerick says. “Having Office as the front end is the way to do that.” Though Microsoft’s Office has been the platform of choice for the majority of business users who rely on Excel, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint applications to get their work done, tradi- Duet for Microsoft and SAP resulted from one of the first formal agreements to tie a large-scale enterprise app into the Office stack. Photos courtesy: SAP 49 December 2007
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.