I agree, that’s why I believe in the Me2 Revolution where everyone is a spokesperson and not just some pr hack. The IE Blog is a great example of a major developer group taking responsibility for communicating to their market.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/

I’ve been on the Internet since it was DarpaNet and BITNET. I participated in the original creation of emoticons. I learned and mapped the nodes so I could send mail with fault tolerance through all the ! leaps from one side of the world to the other in less than 12 hours. I posted probably thousands of posts to Usenet discussion groups. I operate a thriving community of about 4000 former Oracle employees (The OracAlumni Network, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oracle-alumni/) where I post newsletters on a more-or-less weekly basis. I am “authorized” to blog on SDN and Duet.com. My brother is a semi-professional and VERY popular blogger (http://www.iris.org.il/blog/). And yet, I’m not sure I “get” blogging yet. I’m trying — I would normally privately e-mail something like this to you. I don’t think it would help if the MarCom people “get” it — I think the blog-reading community would rather hear from developers and decision makers, not only from officially sanctioned marketing people.

Sorry for the long preamble. To other questions raised here by you and others:

• Duet 1.0 has support for Outlook and Excel initially, with InfoPath integration and tools to enable ISV and customer scenarios coming in the “Value Packs” later this year.

• I think a real problem with previous attempts to integrate Office and enterprise apps is that the entire metaphor of one or the other was attempted — people tried to make the enterprise apps “forms” to show up in Excel or Word, or they tried to make complex enterprise processes and data appear as “functions” in Excel. With Duet, we really worked hard on how the metaphors can integrate.

• It was a LOT of work to make seamless integration in the information worker experience together with complex enterprise information and processes, and to create the technology to enable this integration. We proved the technology with these initial scenarios (time management, leave management, organization management, and budget monitoring). BTW, we aren’t just doing the creation of a request for a vacation day — we did all the workflow integration to do approvals, handle rejections, synchronize with CATS, etc. — this is a LOT deeper and more complete integration than the “me too” announcements we’ve seen lately from one or two other vendors

• SAP has offered various types of integration with various Office components over the years. Longer even than four years However, with Duet we have several new things: joint product from MS and SAP, backed by hundreds of developers and joint accountability to the customer. Fully XAML applications that creates a dynamic “platform” we can use to deploy new scenarios easily in the future. And of course, we are building LOTS of scenarios (many of which were announced yesterday) on this infrastructure.

• For Zoli, were you saying that Duet is not a good name? I was amazed we could get it. AND we got Duet.com! Most SAP and Microsoft names sound like “SAP xApp for Resource and Program Management” (a product I love, but the name — argggghhh!). Generally, we are stuck with descriptive names because all the good names are trademarked by someone in some country somewhere …

• The “extra server” basically routes things between SAP ESA and Exchange so you can do lots of stuff when you are offline. For most of the online functionality, Office talks directly to SAP via Duet and ESA services. The speed of creating this much functionality across two companies is purely a result of web services standards (think about preserving single-sign-on across environments) and the amount of work that went into the services AND METADATA of ESA.

• Regarding Blackberry, I have nothing to say at this point.

• Why don’t SAP’s people respond on this blog? Because they are blogging and answering questions at sdn.sap.com and duet.com …

If any of you want to follow up on any of this, please join the conversation at duet.com … thanks!

Dennis Moore
Father of Duet (although Udo Waibel and his team and Parichay Saxena and his team did all the work …)

Dennis,
I think that a number of these scenarios are using Excel and Word as user interfaces and Exchange as a message transport.

I should try to find someone from the Duet group to come online and answer these questions.

If the action required is a manual email response, Is the use of Outlook simply a half way house in its current guise for certain processes – authorisations for example?

The press release referred to unspecified ‘other plaforms.’

Previously I wrote about How a Good Name Turns out to be Crap – Literally – well, whatever the meaning, it did not hurt Jobby.  Guy Kawasaki was lamenting on the difficulty of finding a good name/domain (Oops, are you sure you want all that commen…