Microsoft and SAP release Duet.

Posted on May 2, 2006
Filed Under Uncategorized |

The joint SAP/Microsoft initiative Mendocino has been renamed Duet. There is a website but it’s crashed, maybe we should have hosted it on Apache. Bummer, but I’m sure it’ll be back up later.

The Microsoft spokesperson The guy from IDC (thanks for catching that Dennis) in the press release does a pretty good job of providing the 100,000 foot flyover of what the product is:

“Duet is a business mashup of Microsoft Office applications with SAP enterprise information and processes that can improve the quality and speed of decision making and workforce productivity. With Duet, SAP will be easier to access and more relevant for many more users who spend their workdays in the ‘Microsoft’ Office.”

But I still wouldn’t know what Duet is from this PR if I hadn’t already see it in action. My take on it is simple, you can use MS Office to do things like time and expense management, benefits enrollment (I think that’s one of the “process packs”), and a couple of other things. All in all, this is pretty cool because it takes the process control and master data out of SAP and the user experience out of Office (hopefully we’ll get this internally because our internal expense management application is fickin aweful to use).

At an architectural level it demonstrates the potential of our ESA platform (which is essentially the “service’izaton of R/3). I am a little mystified that there are only a handful of processes that are exposed with Duet, especially considering the entire service repository of ESA is something like 5,000 services. I’ll have to dig into that a little more.

On a related note, it really bugs me that Memorandum picks up the MS announcement and the only associated blog post is is from Mary Jo at Microsoft Watch. Why can’t our marcom people figure out blogs… really?

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