Duet Future Promised

Duet, an SAP-Microsoft Office integration product, will be updated in 2008, and a third version is on the drawing board according to an announcement made at Sapphire 2007, SAP’s semiannual customer conference. Co-developed by Microsoft and SAP, Duet lets workers access the mySAP suite of business applications using Office applications, such as Outlook. The Sapphire announcement reassures existing customers that Duet will not be dropped and promises partners the opportunity to extend the product, but it provides little information about new features and leaves important technical questions unanswered.

Pushing the Office Lever

Duet uses Office applications (mainly Outlook) as the front end to SAP’s mySAP suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. The product makes mySAP data and processes, historically the domain of back-office specialists and managers, accessible to other workers in an organization, which helps reduce reliance on back-office workers to complete day-to-day tasks. For example, the first version of Duet includes a time-management application that lets workers use Outlook to enter their hours into mySAP.