Duet, the result of collaboration between software vendors Microsoft and SAP, was introduced to delegates last week at the South African leg of the 76-city SAP world tour, held in Midrand.
Duet was known as Project Mendocino during the development phase, noted Mark Tate Smith, director of the Demo@SAP division, who explained it involves linking SAP back-end systems with Microsoft front-end Office products - such as Excel, Outlook and Word.
He demonstrated its functions by using the example of managing cost centres, where budget alerts of overspend will instantly fall into one`s incoming mailbox. E-mails can be opened in Excel or in Word, he showed delegates.
At the annual SAP Sapphire conference, held in Paris in early June, Microsoft`s product manager for Duet, Rob Koplowitz, explained how Duet version one caters for organisational management, time management and budget scheduling.
"One can, for instance, enter schedules into Outlook and have that information show up in cross-application SAP time systems," he said. "The coming together of these two companies will be hugely significant for the industry."
Nils Herzberg, COO of SAP AG`s products and technology group, added that SAP is "moving towards more graphical configurations, rather than the setting of tables".
"[The SAP development group] has put abstraction level upon abstraction level," he said.
Project Muse
Tate Smith devoted some attention to the planned SAP interface, codenamed Project Muse. "It`s a business browser for business users... but it`s just a project, it`s not yet a product," he said.
The graphical user interface is expected to combine Duet, Adobe Flex, Adobe Interactive Forms, and certain SAP portal features. Muse will sit on top of ERP 2005, adding more intuitive features such as the ability to add or delete a field with a right click of a mouse and enhanced navigation offering guidance for specific business processes.
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