Duet Enterprise Team Blog

Enterprise Collaboration & Duet Enterprise

howardbe — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:23:01 GMT

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

howardbe — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:46:14 GMT

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

howardbe — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:30:34 GMT

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

howardbe — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:30:26 GMT

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:

Duet Enterprise: Not your Grandma’s ERP!

howardbe — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:04:06 GMT

Hi, my name is Bas Kamphuis. At the time of the first Duet Enterprise proof of concept I was responsible SAP engineering activities within Microsoft IT but, I actually cannot take any credit, the only credit that I could claim is to help find the awesome the phenomenal team members that made this a reality. Special thanks to Peter Loop and Chris Medina for spearheading the initiative but more importantly the larger team of partners and Microsoft employees that chipped in!

This video was recorded about two weeks into the 4 week engagement that set out to build Tradenet (the first Duet Enterprise showcase). We had just seen some of the SAP data displayed in lists within SharePoint, and we even could roughly maneuver through all the major sections of the site. The fact that we could do this with such a small team in (as stated) only 2 week with a pre-market release product that had never been deployed anywhere or by anyone was just jaw dropping to me. It speaks to the quality of the engineering teams that build the product but also to how strong the SAP & Microsoft relationship is.

You may be familiar with our marketing messages around ‘People Ready’. It encompasses a broad scope, but specifically for our internal Microsoft IT SAP deployments it talks to how we have always engineered solutions that make the user experience more transparent and intuitive. Through the years we have done so using .Net, Office, SharePoint and recently Silverlight. Our users and organization at large reap the benefits. We do not train our end users on how to use IT tools, or simply put: we deploy ‘People Ready’ SAP solutions. Now, as you can imagine this from time to time this did require rocket science (especially if you consider we have been doing this since 1995), however we learned a lot and many of the ‘learnings’ were fed back into the product teams. I believe Duet Enterprise is the accumulation of 15 years of interoperability innovation rapped into a simple foundation. Now every organization can amplify their SAP investments: levering all the strengths of the SAP ERP system but now reaching the casual users and ultimately drive a differentiating yet measurable productivity gain. We did so in 4 weeks, hence my statement ‘a big step forward’.

I’ve often talked to Howard Beader and others that despite all their excellent marketing messaging, how many SAP and Microsoft practitioners have yet to realize how easy it can be to extend SAP and how valuable the results can be. I have suggested that we use more eye catching messaging such as ‘Duet Enterprise: not your grandma’s ERP’ or ‘Pimp my ERP with Duet E’. But my suggestions so far have received only a lukewarm reception. What do you say?

Thank you,

Bas

The Business Value of Duet Enterprise: Whitepaper

howardbe — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:09:41 GMT

Duet Enterprise is based on a simple theory: combine the technology people use every day with the technology used to run the business. The technology that people use every day is primarily Microsoft Office applications, Microsoft Outlook, and for a growing number of workers, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Mobile devices and browser-based interfaces are also an important part of this mix. When it comes to running the operations of a business, a different set of technology is generally used, such as line-of-business applications like SAP with a whole different set of user interfaces.

Duet Enterprise is a new product from the ground up and contains robust technologies that build on the lessons learned in the creation of Duet 1.0 and 1.5. For an in-depth analysis of Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP, be sure to read The Business Value of Duet Enterprise, a new whitepaper created for Microsoft by CITO Research, a new research service led by Dan Woods, author of many books on SAP-related topics. Discover how Duet Enterprise provides bidirectional interoperability between SAP workflows and business objects using the familiar user interfaces of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 and learn about the technology architecture that supports this interoperability. Review a comparison of Duet Enterprise to other approaches and follow the evolution from early Duet versions to Duet Enterprise. This whitepaper also provides a detailed review of the many implications of Duet Enterprise for businesses and summarizes all the aspects of Duet Enterprise as well as covering how existing SAP and Microsoft tools for development and operations are utilized to build and operate composite applications.

After reading this paper you will:

· Better understand the new types of solutions that Duet Enterprise enables

· Organizations will have a thorough technical understanding of Duet Enterprise

· Organizations will receive guidance on SAP & SharePoint interoperability approaches

· Organizations will be able to clearly articulate the business value of Duet Enterprise

Enterprise web service insanity

howardbe — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:56:00 GMT

This post is written by Chris Medina, Program Manager for the SAP Center of Excellence at Microsoft.

First off, the Engineering Forum was awesome! Tele-presence, human centric computing, vision of Microsoft’s Online Data Services, Azure….if you haven’t seen the presentations by Craig Mundi, Dr. Lu, Sumit Mehotra, or Doug Hauger, these are not to be missed. I think you can still view them in //engineering….

The past few weeks have been nuts! But now that I have had some time to sit and think about current events in web services and interoperability between Microsoft and SAP technology, it is clear that it’s like I am in the line up at Ala Moana Basin waiting for waves and a really big swell is coming in…a never-ending huge set of monster barrels called Azure.

I heard that SAP has installed ECC 6.0 up in Azure in a lab, and I have seen a set of apps in the cloud (non ECC6 based) in a demo, and it’s just a matter of time before real ERP in the cloud becomes a reality. A week or so ago I got a chance to catch up with Doug Hauger, the GM in charge of the business side of Azure, and he was excited about ERP in the cloud, but stated there is a lot of work to be done…but the prospects are fascinating. I expect to see some interesting POCs in that space, perhaps even including Duet Enterprise acting as a web service broker to SAP…awesome!

More on Duet Enterprise: the SD folks, MSIT and Cap Gemini have completed their initial scoping of the Hiring Manager POC. I had a chance to attend some of the sessions this week, and the efforts are shaping up very nicely. I am pretty excited at what capabilities will be proven as part of this effort. They are going to be getting deeper into workflow and transactional collaboration and that should really help prove what works and what still needs work. I am pretty stoked on that. Plus they have UI/UX people assigned…that is the way it should be! Nice!

I recently ran thru some of the web service composition tools using Visual Studio 2010, BizTalk Server service orchestration, RFC config in SAP using the SE80 wizard and SOAManager, setting up SSO with Kerberos, and consuming the service in SharePoint. The config on the VS side when creating a project from scratch is not without pain! It seems like so much of it can be scripted…my hope is for a wizard that drives the entity configuration, naming, and other error-prone steps. On the other hand, with Duet Enterprise, the config pain is on the SAP side, and I am hoping we can eventually use a wizard to set up Duet Enterprise once the proper RFCs have been developed, or identified…c’mon guys, wizard driven automated config!!

Duet Enterprise – TradeNet POC with MSIT

howardbe — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:01:33 GMT

This post is brought to you by Peter Loop, Sr. Principal Architect and Chris Medina from Microsoft IT.

Well it’s been a few weeks since SAPPHIRE and the jet lag has worn off, but the buzz and interest has not waned a bit! The TradeNet POC was a hit! Vishal Sikka, the CTO of SAP, called us out in the keynote (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW5FgBPXF7Q), and now the flood gates have opened. We now have a new Duet Enterprise proof of concept that is kicking into high gear in the HR realm that involves a hiring manager scenario. Additionally, we have at least one more POC heating up in the demand planning space. Add on top of that a ton of interest from field sales around TradeNet, how we optimize our SAP platform, information on operational savings, and MSIT’s vision for Service Oriented Architecture, and we are swamped.

But hey, bring it on – that’s why we showcase our technology in the first place! Some of the team attended the pilot training sessions, and things are getting better. Next week we have some time with the Duet Enterprise product team (MS and SAP) to describe our learnings from the TradeNet POC, and that should be really interesting. Soon the rapid deployment program will kick into high gear, and we will be right there working internally, and we are very excited to see what more we can do with this new product. There are some really cool ideas flying around offering a new roadmap forward for some of our applications and who knows where this could take us. The sky could be the limit. I keep thinking – “I wish it were RTM already..” But then I remind myself that we have some key things that we in MSIT want to help shape and solve. This is a very exciting time!

New Video: Duet Enterprise Overview

howardbe — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:11:54 GMT

Hello my name is Howard Beader and I am a Group Product Manager with Microsoft responsible for Duet Enterprise.

I am very pleased to share with you this short video introduction to Duet Enterprise. In this video you can Learn more about Duet Enterprise and it’s 3 main pillars including: a foundation enabling interoperability between SAP applications and Microsoft SharePoint, Tools & Services to compose solutions that blend the worlds of process and collaboration and ready-to-use capabilities that provide immediate value to end users.

Call for Nominations - Duet Enterprise Rapid Deployment Program

howardbe — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:48:00 GMT

Hello my name is Howard Beader and I am a Group Product Manager with Microsoft responsible for Duet Enterprise. I am very pleased to announce that the Duet Enterprise Rapid Deployment Program (“Duet Enterprise RDP”) has begun with the launch of the first phase of the program – Call for Nominations. This first phase will run for four weeks, concluding on Friday May 14th, 2010.

The Duet Enterprise Rapid Deployment Program (“Duet Enterprise RDP”) provides selected participants with a unique opportunity to work closely with Microsoft and SAP on the initial release of Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP software. The key goals of the program are:

• Drive customer production deployments for launch

• Support Development of Duet Enterprise partner solutions

• Gather customer and partner evidence

The Duet Enterprise RDP Program is following a two-phased approach. Starting now customers and partners can initiate their nominations for the RDP program through their Microsoft representative. After customers and partners are selected for the RDP program, the typical legal documents will need to be signed, resources need to be identified, and a solution proposal design document will also have to be created. The selected customer’s and partner’s project team members will have the option to participate in our Duet Enterprise class room trainings in the US, EMEA and APAC.

The Deployment and Development phase follows a two phase approach:

Phase 1: The pilot version of Duet Enterprise will be deployed and the development of Duet Enterprise partner and customer solutions will be kicked-off.

Phase 2: Duet Enterprise will be deployed in a production environment on-site at the customer, or partner solutions will be ready for customer deployment.

Beginning in Calendar year Q4 customer and partner evidence activities will be initiated including the creation of case studies, success stories and other marketing opportunities.

As a next step for those customers and partners interested in participating in the program please contact your Microsoft representative for more information. Further information can be found online at www.Microsoft.com/duet

Join us for SAPPHIRE NOW and the ASUG Annual Conference (May 16-19, Orlando)

howardbe — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:24:00 GMT

Join us May 16-19 for the SAPPHIRE NOW and the ASUG Annual Conference events co-located in Orlando. These premier technology events give you the ultimate opportunity to network with SAP customers, partners, team members, and industry experts. Plus, you'll gain insights into how to maximize innovative technology and business strategies to drive business results at every level. Partnering with Microsoft at Sapphire Now will be Cap Gemini, and Hitachi, and Infosys.

Please plan on attending these great sessions:

SAP Interoperability with Microsoft SharePoint Using Duet Enterprise
Tuesday, May 18 3:00 - 3:20 pm
Familiarize yourself with SAP's approach for interoperability: simple, flexible, and accessible. SAP software works with any third-party tool or device, enabling more people to access business data and processes through the tool of their choice. See how Duet Enterprise, a joint product by SAP and Microsoft, allows business users to consume and extend SAP applications through Microsoft SharePoint and Office.

Capture the Value of Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP
Wednesday, May 19 12:00 - 12:20 pm
The soon-to-be-released Duet Enterprise is a new joint product from SAP and Microsoft that enables interoperability between SAP applications and SharePoint 2010. Duet Enterprise enables you to generate more value from your investments, achieve efficiency in enabling interoperability between SAP and SharePoint 2010 and addresses the growing need for team collaboration and business insight while increasing personal and team productivity.

Extend SAP Application to Microsoft SharePoint using Duet Enterprise
Wednesday, May 19 4:00 - 5:00 pm
Learn from the experts who will walk you through a simple step-by-step process of enabling an SAP business process object to Microsoft SharePoint BDC entity using Duet Enterprises for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP software. Duet Enterprise is a joint product from SAP and Microsoft that empowers all employees to consume and extend SAP software processes and information from Microsoft SharePoint and Office 2010. This session will enlighten attendees about the process, skillset required, and tools available to enable any SAP application run Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Please also visit Microsoft at booth 1118 in the SAPPHIRE 2010 exposition area.

Sapphire Now EMEA
Sapphire Now will also take place in Frankfurt, May 17 - 19. Click here to register and learn more details.

Please plan on attending the following session at Sapphire Now EMEA:
SAP Interoperability with Microsoft SharePoint Using Duet Enterprise
Tuesday, May 18 10:30 - 10:50 am
Familiarize yourself with SAP's approach for interoperability: simple, flexible, and accessible. SAP software works with any third-party tool or device, enabling more people to access business data and processes through the tool of their choice. See how Duet Enterprise, a joint product by SAP and Microsoft, allows business users to consume and extend SAP applications through Microsoft SharePoint and Office.

Technical Overview of Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP

howardbe — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:35:00 GMT

Hi this is Christian Reichel from the Duet Enterprise team. I wanted to take a moment to provide you with a brief technical overview of Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP.

This technology enables users to access and interact with business processes, and information in SAP applications by using SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Office® 2010.

Duet Enterprise is built on two well-known platforms: SAP Netweaver and Microsoft SharePoint. Duet Enterprise does not bring any new platform into the market. Instead of that, Duet Enterprise leverages existing platforms and unifies already existing services around security, supportability and manageability. This enables IT organizations to rationalize their IT architecture and to decrease the time required for implementation.

Duet Enterprise consists of two Add-ons sitting on top of the two platforms. The Duet Enterprise SAP Add-on is running on top of SAP Netweaver 7.02 ABAP while the Duet Enterprise SharePoint Add-on is running on top of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition.

In the SAP environment, the Duet Enterprise SAP Add-on provides services for enabling the interoperability between SAP business applications and Microsoft SharePoint and Office. The Duet Enterprise SAP Add-on relies on SAP components in an SAP NetWeaver 7.02 server that is able to access any generation of SAP applications from SAP R/3 to the latest versions of SAP systems. The Duet Enterprise SAP Add-on provides ready-to-use business content, features and services around Duet Enterprise Workflow and Duet Enterprise Reporting. It also includes some basic services around content publishing, data caching, system routing and role provision.

On Microsoft Side, the Duet Enterprise SharePoint Add-on is running on top of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. There are multiple SharePoint server components Duet Enterprise is leveraging like the Business Connectivity Services (BCS), Enterprise Content Management and SharePoint Workflow. The Business Connectivity Services are a set of services and features that provide a way to connect SharePoint solutions to sources of external data. In Duet Enterprise, BCS is used heavily to bring SAP data into SharePoint. The Duet Enterprise SharePoint Add-on contains Duet Enterprise specific components like Duet Enterprise site templates and features around Duet Enterprise Workflow, Duet Enterprise Reporting and Collaboration.

On client side, users can get access to Duet Enterprise solutions via the Browser, directly from the well knows user interface of Microsoft Office 2010 or from their mobile device. For the rich client experience based on Office 2010 no specific client framework installation is required. Duet Enterprise leverages standard functionality provided by Office 2010 Pro Plus to run Office based client applications.

Ready to Use Capabilities

By providing a set of ready-to-use capabilities, customers will be able to get value out of Duet Enterprise immediately. Duet Enterprise delivers ready-to-use capabilities with quick time to value for users to collaborate around SAP information, participate in SAP workflows, access SAP reports, explore HR information and interact with SAP information directly from the well knows user interface of Microsoft SharePoint and Office.

Duet Enterprise Composites

Duet Enterprise enables IT organizations and partners to compose new solutions that blend SAP data and processes with Microsoft SharePoint content and collaboration. These so called Duet Enterprise Composites are solutions running on top of the Duet Enterprise foundation. Duet Enterprise Composites can be built by SAP and Microsoft, the partner eco system and customers IT organizations. Microsoft and SAP will provide sites, templates and building blocks to get access to SAP information from SharePoint to speed up the development of new composites. Customers and partners developing Duet Enterprise Composites can leverage existing standard tools having millions of developers in place, like SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio and the well know ABAP Workbench.

Somya Kapoor of SAP Talks about Duet Enterprise

howardbe — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:06:47 GMT

We recently sat down with Somya Kapoor from the Duet Enterprise Solution Management Team at SAP to chat about the new solution. Check out the video to see what she has to say about Duet Enterprise.

Getting ready for a Duet Enterprise Deployment

howardbe — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:49:00 GMT

Greetings from the Duet Enterprise product team.

My name is Ranganathan Srikanth and I am a Lead Program Manager in the Duet Enterprise team.

Duet Enterprise, as you might already know, is built on top of two big platforms, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 & SAP Net Weaver 7.02. Before embarking on a Duet Enterprise project, IT administrators, systems integrators and consultants need to do some careful planning. While this is true for any project, it’s truer for Duet Enterprise, since Duet Enterprise deals with the interoperability of SAP applications with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010. This requires navigating extra layers of process, people, software stack and their dependencies from two companies.

A typical Duet Enterprise deployment can be broadly categorized into five distinct phases.

Preparation Phase
Installation Phase
Configuration
Development / Customize
Rollout

In this blog, I will outline the software and hardware pre-requisites for Duet Enterprise which will help in planning.

Software pre-requisites

Microsoft software
- Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
  - Please note that SharePoint 2010 will run only on 64 bit OS only.
  - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx details the Operating System requirements for SharePoint 2010
  - SharePoint 2010 software requirements can be found here. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(office.14).aspx#section3
- Microsoft Office 2010 Pro Plus (for offline experience)
SAP software
- SAP NetWeaver 7.02.

Hardware requirements

I recommend that you plan your SharePoint deployment configuration based on the best practices guides from SharePoint 2010. SharePoint team has published a lot of resources. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee518643.aspx is an excellent starting point.

To plan your hardware needs for your SharePoint 2010 deployment, use the following resource, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(office.14).aspx. The Duet Enterprise team will be publishing a capacity planning guide in the future, which can help you plan for a scale roll-out.

If you are planning to use Hyper-V configurations for your SharePoint deployment, then I recommend that you read this article.

In the subsequent blogs, I will identify the hardware requirements for the SAP servers as well.

Plan your browser support story

Its important that you are aware of the browsers that are supported in Duet Enterprise. Duet Enterprise supports the same set of browsers that SharePoint 2010 supports. The support matrix can be found here. Please note that some features may not work in Firefox 3.5 / 3.6 because of ActiveX dependencies. In a later blog, these Duet Enterprise features will be called out.

I hope this gets you started. Looking forward to hearing from all of you.

Welcome to the Duet Enterprise Team Blog!

howardbe — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 08:04:00 GMT

My name is Pascal Gibert and I am the Director of Product Management for Duet Enterprise at Microsoft.

At PDC 2009 Microsoft announced our intent to deliver Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP software in the second half of 2010.

Developed jointly by Microsoft and SAP, Duet Enterprise offers new tools and services for creating solutions that combine process and collaboration—and provides ready-to-use capabilities that are of immediate value to our customers.

I encourage you to watch this space in the coming weeks and months where we will be sharing ongoing product and industry news, provide a deep dive on the different components of Duet Enterprise, offer implementation and development tips and tricks, and give you a glimpse at some of the people behind the technology.

In January we held our first Developer Kitchens where implementers and developers were offered a first look at the new technology. The reaction from customers and partners, even at such an early stage, was overwhelmingly positive.

In March we conducted a well-attended partner webcast that is now available on demand. In this presentation, we shared an overview of Duet Enterprise, including the system requirements and architecture, and providing guidance on how to engage in our upcoming Rapid Deployment Program (RDP).

We are also in the process of deploying Duet Enterprise within the company and working on some exciting proof of concepts just in time for Sapphire 2010 Conferences in the US and Germany this May.

Check back often for the most recent news, information, and resources as we launch this exciting new product. You can also follow us via Facebook and Twitter.

-Pascal