Mendocino a.k.a Duet to set the tune in June

Microsoft and SAP have announced that their joint venture “Project Mendocino”, which was launched one year back with the purpose of integrating SAP business processes with Microsoft Office applications, will be available all over the world from June 2006. It has now been christened Duet. The two companies have stated that there will be additions to the capabilities of Duet with the objective of tackling additional business scenarios. This will happen in the second half of 2006. Duet users can expect improvements in the decision making process and increased compliance with corporate policies.

SAP applications will be easier to use via the Microsoft Office interface. Duet has been described as a business integration of SAP enterprise information and processes with Microsoft Office applications; the integration will help improve the quality and the pace at which workforce productivity is achieved. Since most company employees are familiar with Microsoft Office applications, Duet will help in fostering quick user adoption and enabling users to gain comfort with SAP enterprise systems and business processes.

This will help bring down deployment and training costs. Duet has garnered good reviews from system integrators and solution providers who partner SAP and Microsoft. Success of Duet could lead to a number of business application integration projects for the business partners of the two companies. Duet will allow users to access financial data through Budget Monitoring; the Time Management module will help in recording work and pay calculation by synchronizing Outlook and mySAP ERP; Leave Management will enable efficient approval and management of leave requests; Organization Management will allow employees to access company information and HR-related data via Outlook.

The two partners are expected to provide a couple of value packs for Duet for improving platform capabilities and language support. The value packs will enable the execution of five mySAP applications through Microsoft Office. These applications include recruitment management, travel management, sales activity management, analytics, and purchasing management. The value packs will offer language support to include English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. The 2007 release of Microsoft Office and new releases of mySAP ERP will work with these value packs. Starting June 13th, SAP will host a tour across 13 cities in the U.S. More information can be had on the website www.duet.com.