Duet Delivers Office Client for SAP

A product co-developed by Microsoft and SAP will give customers self-service access to business functionality in the mySAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) application via Microsoft Office. Duet 1.0 (formerly code-named Mendocino) shipped in June 2006 and be followed later in 2006 by a pair of “value packs” that will make additional mySAP processes available to Office. Duet will allow businesses to expand SAP access to more users and help Microsoft position Office as a client platform for custom business applications. However, Duet 1.0 offers no tools for developers; partners must wait for subsequent releases to customize the product.

What Is Duet?

Announced in Apr. 2005, Duet is a joint Microsoft-SAP product that uses Office 2003 applications (mainly Outlook) as the front end to mySAP, the successor to SAP’s R/3 ERP applications. (SAP plans to end mainstream support for R/3 in 2009.) MySAP includes standard ERP functionality-such as financial management, human resources, supply chain management, and warehouse and distribution applications-as well as customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities. Duet works only with mySAP.