SAPPHIRE 2006, Day +1 — SAPPHIRE is over, and the flight back home gave me the opportunity to think over what I have learned this week. One thing that I found particularly interesting in the stream of announcements that were made during the event was Duet, which came out of a partnership between Microsoft and SAP.

Martin LaMonica was one of the first to write about it a couple of weeks ago, and I got to learn more about the upcoming product when our group of bloggers met with Dennis Moore, Senior Vice President at SAP Labs. Essentially, Duet — also known under the Mendocino code name — is an integration between mySAP Business Suite 2005 and Microsoft Office 2007. The business case behind it is pretty cool: on one hand, mySAP Business Suite is a fairly expensive application used by a fairly limited number of people. On the other hand, Microsoft Office is a rather inexpensive application used by a very large number of people. Somewhere in the middle, there should be a market for a decently-priced application that would be used by a pretty large number of people.

What we saw at SAPPHIRE was a preview for the first version, to be released sometime in Q3 this year. This version mainly focuses on integration with Microsoft Outlook, while future versions should include Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word as well. Integration with Microsoft Outlook is pretty straightforward: for workflow applications, events generated by SAP can lead to the creation of a task within Outlook. For business intelligence activities, custom reports can be sent by the application via email and manipulated through specific viewers within Outlook. Down the road, integration with Microsoft Excel should make such reports even more interactive, while integration with Microsoft Word and InfoPath should open the door to complex workflow interactions supported by dynamic forms. Regarding the later, one has to wonder how it will interfere with SAP’s partnership with Adobe though.

One thing that got me really excited was to learn than Duet was built using web service interfaces that have been made public and are free to use for third-party software vendors. Even though the Duet product itself includes some kind of middleware that bridges the gap between mySAP Business Suite 2005 and Microsoft Office 2007 and requires customers to buy a license for it, nothing should prevent a third-party vendor to re-implement such a piece of middleware for other office productivity suites.

Granted, Microsoft Office has such a large share of the market that it would make an effort like this questionable at best, even though there must be a small market for some integration with OpenOffice. What’s more interesting in my view is integration with Office 2.0 suites, such as Zoho for example. Integration with Gmail and Google Calendar would be interesting as well. And why not using it for integrating SAP with Salesforce.com? The later managed to sign some pretty big SAP accounts lately, but it does not mean that SAP is going away within such accounts. What this means is that better integration between the two applications will be needed moving forward. This is a good example of what a BPMS can be used for.

Another interesting prospect would be the use of similar mechanisms to connect legacy versions of SAP R/3 — which will dominate the market for years to come — to older versions of Microsoft Office, such as Microsoft Office 2003 for example. Once customers will have indicated which features of Duet they like the most, it should not be too difficult for a BPM 2.0 vendor to re-implement similar features on top of SAP R/3, and make them work for the version of Microsoft Office that most customers will still be running in 2008 or 2009. To me, these other duos, be they powered by Office 2.0 or Office 2003, make for a pretty nice business opportunity, and they should really contribute to improve end-user productivity, especially for those that are not SAP power users. This is definitely something that Intalio should pursue with our Demand Driven Development program.

UPDATE: Zoli Erdos has a very interesting post on Duet.