Duet Enterprise Team Blog

Duet Enterprise Team Blog is Moving

2011-02-05T00:47:00Z

Thanks to our readers of the Duet Enterprise Team Blog for your support! As an update, we’ve moved to the SharePoint Team Blog and will post all future entries about Duet Enterprise there. Please bookmark the new blog!

-Duet Enterprise Team

Duet Enterprise: General Availability (GA) Update

2010-12-01T17:55:12Z

December 1, 2010

Today we have achieved a major development milestone of our jointly developed product, Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP, with its general availability scheduled for later this week. Microsoft and SAP have been working hard to bring this product to market and to make sure our early customers are highly satisfied. Come hear their stories first-hand at our Duet Enterprise Launch Summit on February 1, 2011.

Duet Enterprise expands the value of existing customer investments in SAP and Microsoft by increasing individual productivity, and allowing a rapid response to shifting business needs. Duet Enterprise does this by enabling the interoperability between SAP applications and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010. The solution provides a simplified approach for our customers to bring together the business processes and data from SAP applications with the content and collaboration capabilities offered with SharePoint.

At the upcoming Duet Enterprise Launch Summit where you’ll hear keynotes from top executives at SAP and Microsoft, you will learn about both the business and technology value of Duet Enterprise. Our vibrant partner ecosystem will provide insight into the breadth and depth of their solutions already built with Duet Enterprise. Visit the summit site and make sure you reserve a spot for you and your colleagues. You can also familiarize yourself with Duet Enterprise and gain a better understanding of how this can help your company achieve its IT strategy by going to http://www.sap.com/duetenterpriseenterprise or www.microsoft.com/duet.

See you on February 1, 2011!

Best regards,

Rakesh Agarwal
Chief Product Owner
Duet Enterprise
SAP Labs

Hari Prasad
Principal Group Program Manager
Duet Enterprise
Microsoft

Duet Enterprise at SAP TechEd

2010-10-27T20:11:06Z

Here is the wrap up report from USA SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas last week, where attendee numbers of 5,500 were on par with their record year in 2008!

Microsoft was clearly a relevant story at the SAP conference this year with large amount of interest in our joint product Duet Enterprise for SharePoint and SAP. Not only did we have our usual presence in the Exhibit Hall, but we also had a key location in the community clubhouse area with Intel, standing/sitting room only in all of our speaking sessions but we also had numerous highlights and mentions by Vishal Sikka (SAP CTO and Executive Board Member) during his keynote to kick off the week. The interest in our “Microsoft and SAP: Better Together” story is very strong not only with our customer and partners, but also with nearly every SAP employee who I had the opportunity talk with this week. It is exciting to see the partnership with SAP continue to gain momentum.

Microsoft can never have a strong presence at any show without great resources, so I want to thank all of our staff from MSIT, DPE, MCS, the Duet and SQL Server teams and the Microsoft-SAP Technology Center staff for the long hours they put in making this conference a success for the SAP Alliance and Sales teams.

Keynote:

A packed keynote session delivered by SAP CTO Vishal Sikka, where all the chairs were taken and many attendees were standing against the walls or sitting on the floor. During his 90 minute session Duet Enterprise was highlighted across multiple slides and a video of Microsoft IT’s latest Duet Enterprise pilot was shown and a demo on end-to-end support and monitoring between SharePoint and SAP was showcased. Vishal also thanked Microsoft for all the work we have done together in bringing our solutions to market, and specifically highlighted that partnerships can work and result in successful joint efforts. Vishal called out a few items every organization should be pursuing this year, and Duet Enterprise is called out specifically. For those interested, the full keynote can be seen here.

Exhibit Hall/Community Clubhouse

Microsoft’s exhibit hall presence this year focused on Duet Enterprise and our Windows/SQL Server platform story for SAP. We had a staff of over 10 people who were constantly busy during show hours. 3 of our 4 pod locations were tasked with Duet Enterprise with SQL Server on the 4^th. All pods were extremely busy all week and I did notice on several occasions that our people pulled out their own laptops and moved away from the booth to have more in depth discussions with customers due to the high volume of people at our booth.

In addition to the Microsoft booth, our friends at Intel invited us to be part of their booth also. At the Intel booth we showcased the Mission Critical capabilities of SAP on Windows Server 2008 R2 in a virtualized (Hyper-V) environment on the Intel Platform. We had a great demonstration showing Live Migrations of an active (transactions were being processed) SAP system from one virtual system to another on another. Customers immediately recognized the benefits of this capability (no SAP downtime required for system maintenance). Intel commented that the Microsoft pod was consistently the busiest area of their booth all week, with people standing 6-8 deep watching the Live demo and listening to our story.

Microsoft also had several “meet the expert” sessions. These were scheduled times in a casual lounge setting where customers could stop by, relax and discuss in more detail our Duet Enterprise story, both of our MSIT Duet Pilots and SQL Server on SAP. Howard Beader, Peter Loop, Kristen Chester and Juergen Thomas facilitated these discussions.

Sessions

And finally, the reason most people attend SAP TechEd conferences… the sessions! SAP TechEd is a unique opportunity for customers to not only hear detailed presentations on topics but also sign up for hands-on sessions on a variety of areas. Microsoft had several speaking sessions on Duet Enterprise and general SharePoint-SAP Interoperability as well as a hands-on session where customers were able to roll up their sleeves and get a peek at Duet Enterprise months before it releases this quarter. All sessions were offered at least twice and each time they were full, with standing room only and SAP having to close the doors due to room capacity 5-10 minutes before each session began. One of our sessions had so many attendees registered that SAP asked us to repeat it later that afternoon to accommodate the demand.

Here is a video montage:

Duet Enterprise Rocks SAP TechEd: Day 1 Report

2010-10-20T16:40:00Z

I wanted to share all Duet Enterprise excitement from day 1 at SAP Tech Ed, Las Vegas!

SAP TechEd has roughly 5000+ attendees this year on site at the Venetian in Las Vegas, and has a virtual presence online as well. The excitement began with a packed keynote session delivered by SAP CTO - Vishal Sikka, during his 90 minute session, Duet Enterprise was highlighted across multiple slides, the Microsoft IT (Peter Loop) video, Cap Gemini video, and a 2^nd end to end support Duet Enterprise demo as well.

Keynotes:

Vishal also thanked Microsoft for all the work we have done together in bringing this to market, and specifically highlighted that partnerships can work and result in successful joint efforts. I have attached a few photos from the keynote, apologize for the quality in advance as these are from my phone, note that in keynote_1, Duet Enterprise was clearly introduced at the event, in Keynote 2, Peter Loop from MSIT is speaking, and in Keynote 3, Duet Enterprise was mentioned as one of the few items every organization should be pursuing this year.

Hands On Lab:

Following the keynote we had our joint Duet Enterprise hands on session, the session had seating and machines for roughly 50 people, we had a line with over 200 people wanting to attend our session! We did add another line of chairs in the back for people to sit in and watch, but unfortunately had to turn many folks away until the next hands on lab on Thursday. Pictures are attached for this session as well.

Booth:

We had 3 demo pods showcasing Duet Enterprise demo’s, and a staff of 10+ SMEs (Microsoft & SAP). We were clearly the busiest booth at the event and the excitement about Duet Enterprise was apparent from both the customers and partners, a picture is attached.

Day 2:

Today is also a huge day for us here at the event with the exhibit floor open again, 2 joint expert sessions (one with Accenture and MSIT, and a second with SAP) , a joint technical overview presentation with SAP and Cap Gemini, and a Live streaming interview at noon PST via SAP TechEd Live with Cap Gemini, SAP and me.

Virtual Participation:

Do check out virtual Tech Ed here: SAP TechEd Live

It is very clear that we have great excitement for Duet Enterprise, more to come from SAP TechEd throughout the week!

Duet Enterprise at SAP TechEd Berlin

2010-10-18T16:04:12Z

I wanted to share a bit of the excitement from last week's event at SAP Tech Ed in Berlin. We had a standing room only crowd for our joint Duet Enterprise overview session with SAP & Cap Gemini with over 120 attendees in the room sitting and folks standing everywhere they could, check out the pictures below!.

Duet Enterprise was highlighted in the keynote presentation by Vishal Sikka, and we had 5+ Duet Enterprise sessions, and a Microsoft booth highlighting Duet Enterprise & SQL.

Next up in our march towards launch is SAP Tech Ed, Las Vegas, which is this week, with over 10 Duet Enterprise sessions that are joint with SAP & partners, a Microsoft booth highlighting Duet Enterprise & SQL. We are looking forward to seeing many of our joint customers and partners at the event!

See you there!

Duet Enterprise: Supplier Sourcing and Collaborative Quotation

2010-09-15T21:26:02Z

Here are some examples of how Duet Enterprise can have a significant impact:

Supplier Sourcing: Do you work on a sourcing project to find suppliers for a key part? With a composite application created using Duet Enterprise, you can design a collaboration site that pulls in material information, live from the SAP materials master objects, and create a set of sharable documents that allow core information to be used in collaboration with people inside and outside your company. Those newly found suppliers could be entered into the SAP system through a new vendor scenario, which is running on SharePoint. This allows for the engineering team, product team, development team, and marketing team to collaborate on the parts design and helps you find the best vendor to provide the materials.

Collaborative Quotation: Many projects require rapid collaboration on a document such as a quotation. Using Duet Enterprise, one team member might view a new quotation, identify the need for input from his team, set up a collaborative workspace and invite the team members, and add data so they can provide feedback. The team joins the workspace and can access the SAP documents they need to view. They then jointly author a response using Microsoft® Word and save the document to the SAP system. The supervisor is then notified that the quotation is ready for approval. All of this is done seamlessly, without emailing documents back and forth or logging in to multiple systems.

For More Information get the Duet Enterprise whitepaper.

Enterprise Collaboration & Duet Enterprise

2010-08-31T17:23:01Z

SharePoint has multiple collaboration features such as shareable documents, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, tagging, document sets that share common metadata, workflow, task management, and integration with Office Communication Services that allows users to collectively get work done.

With Duet Enterprise, you can collaborate around an SAP business object. For example, if you are working on a purchase order, you can bring together data from disparate business units, and those content users can use a site template to create a collaboration site on the fly around that order and share information that will populate the fields until the order is complete.

If you’re working on a big proposal, you need qualifications, resumes, and data from across your organization—or several organizations if it is a joint venture. Instead of concentrating responsibility in one person, who will be relying on email threads and attachments, with Duet Enterprise, you can centralize the proposal effort, drawing off information in one or more SAP and Office systems.

For More Information get the Duet Enterprise whitepaper.

Duet Enterprise: A Cost-Saving Platform for Interoperability

2010-08-17T20:46:14Z

When you use SharePoint 2010 to access SAP information and processes, the extensibility of your most important applications increases, particularly where outside partners or contractors are concerned. Many internal or external users, the vast majority of who will be familiar with Microsoft Office, will have a need to access and work with line-of-business processes.

By using new solutions facilitated by Duet Enterprise, adoption and extension of your line-of-business systems becomes much easier, and the results are reflected in business metrics. Experience shows that adoption decreases as complex systems such as SAP are extended further away from the finance department that was their initial home. If Microsoft solutions, which have a familiar and intuitive user experience, can be the primary vehicle for adopting line-of-business systems, you can reduce training costs and increase data quality across applications that use both structured and unstructured data. People want a single façade for accessing all their information.

Increase IT effectiveness:

Using Duet Enterprise, IT is able to reduce the backlog of applications business users’ demand of their IT staff. Instead of building 10 applications per year, you can build dozens using the technology platforms you already know and trust. And as access to key process steps are added and collaboration is captured and stored overtime, your IT institutional memory grows and becomes richer. And because of its built-in permissions, security controls, roles, and other SAP artifacts, the applications that had been lying fallow or partly finished because the development team ran out of time and had to move on to the next project can now be deployed in days rather than weeks or months. The more pernicious aspects of bringing to life—and maintaining and supervising—a SharePoint application using business content and process steps have been streamlined to a high degree.

Using Duet Enterprise also opens the door to a much broader range of developers than ever before. This means that the supply of SAP ABAP programmers is no longer a bottleneck to creating applications that extend the functionality and data from SAP to a wider group of users.

For More Information get the Duet Enterprise whitepaper.

Duet Enterprise: Solving IT Challenges

2010-08-10T19:30:34Z

In this post John Berry talks about Duet Enterprise and the challenges it seeks to solve.

One of the challenges John sees is how private data can be pulled into a lab environment to be used by developers. Duet Enterprise is a platform capability that spans across many organizations within a IT organization. Duet Enterprise Brings Experts from Exchange, SharePoint, and SAP and puts all of those components into one spot of the IT Organization.

SAP & SharePoint: Better Together with Duet Enterprise

2010-08-06T00:30:26Z

Duet Enterprise: Neville Rademeyer, VP Engineering, MSIT

Some of the challenges Neville has seen while working in the SAP environment is ease of use. SharePoint is a huge opportunity because many Microsoft products are already leveraged in SAP Space. Neville is most impressed by how data from SAP can be put into SharePoint, manipulated and leveraged with very little custom development and in a secure way move it back to SAP. He Recently did demo for 500 CIOs and got great feedback on ease of use.

See more in the video: