Microsoft SharePoint Combines with SAP ERP

SAP and Microsoft announced what some observers see as a reboot of Duet, the strategy first formed by the companies in 2005 to tie SAP's enterprise resource planning (ERP) software with Microsoft Office.

When Duet was first released, the SAP and Microsoft technologies were not fully developed, according to Ray Wang, CEO and principal analyst at Constellation Research, and therefore the result was difficult to deploy and too expensive.

The recent availability of Duet Enterprise, which is software that connects Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with SAP’s ERP application, will be sold through a new joint partner program.

The success of the program will still depend on key factors such as cost and ease of integration. It is assumed that SAP and Microsoft have a better chance at success this time around as most SAP ERP customers are going to have some level of SharePoint adoption and that is familiarity and ease of integration is definitely appealing to them.

Duet Enterprise will provide customers with tools and preconfigured content that will help speed up the development of composite applications for SAP and SharePoint. Other features include single sign-on, management and monitoring tools, as well as support for offline usage.

Customers will now be able to create collaborative workspaces that present information from SAP ERP applications to users of Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office. This improvement will enable workflow integrations, such as allowing users to handle approval requests from an SAP application from within Outlook or SharePoint.

While the new product has similar features to the existing Duet, it is built on SAP's new Project Gateway integration framework, which allows standards-based access to SAP applications. SAP customers working in a Microsoft environment are sure to take notice.

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