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 and Microsoft Corp. announced that the two companies will ship the product on time in June. The product is officially named Duet software for Microsoft Office and SAP. SAP and Microsoft also announced plans to enhance the capabilities of Duet this year and to release additional business scenarios in the second half of 2006.
Duet allows information workers to use their familiar Microsoft Office environment to access selected SAP business processes and data. This improved and flexible access to dedicated SAP application functionality reportedly will help companies who use Duet save time and money, increase process compliance, and improve decision making. Advisory Group analyst Bob Mick commented, "Duet is one important element of an overall strategy to optimize knowledge worker environments based on roles. Role-based environments allow workers to use their dominant applications environment (Microsoft Outlook for example) and reduce the number of times they must go to another environment (SAP for example) for information to accomplish their jobs. Microsoft is doing important user research in this area, and we expect to see many other products like Duet as the needs of various roles are more clearly defined."
×
