Beating partner and competitor SAP AG to the punch, Microsoft Corp. released software that it says will enable customers of its Dynamics AX ERP and CRM packages to use Office 2003 to access and share mission-critical data as well as initiate cross-enterprise collaborative workflows.
The software, called Dynamics Snap, "snaps in" to Office 2003 to enable, for example, Outlook calendars to connect with data and business processes managed by Microsoft's Dynamics AX and CRM enterprise software, eliminating the need to jump between the two applications' environments. From Office, for instance, Dynamics enterprise software users can now perform tasks such as scheduling vacations, filling out timesheets, and inserting financial and customer data into spreadsheets and word processing documents that can be shared via email, Microsoft said.
Interestingly, Snap is similar to functionality that Microsoft and SAP are jointly developing under the code name Mendocino, which will give Office users access to mySAP ERP data and business processes, according to a statement from Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS), the business unit responsible for the software giant's enterprise computing strategy. SAP previewed Mendocino last year, and expects to make the software generally available in July of this year.
By enabling more seamless data sharing and collaborative business processes to be initiated via its ubiquitous suite of personal productivity tools, Microsoft hopes Snap will help to eliminate the laborious, frustrating, and mistake-prone task of manually cutting and pasting data between its disparate application environments -- which is par for the course even at the most technologically advanced companies, including those that have reduced their inter-disciplinary informational silos to a precious few.
That's critical, noted Jim Shepherd, an enterprise applications analyst at AMR Research (Boston), given the many hours each business day that users spend in Microsoft Office applications such as Outlook. "You still have to be [in Office] even if you're running your business on a fully integrated [enterprise] suite," he noted. "Both Mendocino and Snap are just the beginning ... to closing the productivity gap."
Initiatives like Snap and Mendocino will help organizations get more bang from their enterprise applications, where much of the functionality is underutilized and many seats are licensed but are not used by mid-level and senior managers. "If [organizations] want their business systems to be the primary place where users go to get information and manage data, they need to move these systems to where the people are," Shepherd said.
Snap reflects MBS' ongoing but until recently subdued push to connect its Office suite with its enterprise applications under its Project Green initiative (now known as Dynamics), which aims to create a common web services foundation under .Net to enable its disparate enterprise applications to share data and business processes with one another. Already, Microsoft has rolled out tighter integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 and Office applications.
Underlying all of this is the notion that businesses should take a role-based approach to enterprise computing, in which business professionals are given tailored access via familiar interfaces to data and applications based on the tasks they routinely perform. "We've been talking about this for a while, but we've finally figured out how to say it," noted Sharon Ward, MBS' manufacturing industry managing director in an interview.
Microsoft, she noted, has historically enabled organizations to share unstructured data -- such as word processing documents and spreadsheets -- and more recently, has provided the means to share in real time structured ERP and product design data across departments and between business partners. But the two worlds rarely intersected -- outside of sneaker net, she pointed out.
"[Snap] is more about how to get information to users so they can take action without having to log in and log out of separate systems," she said.
Manufacturers will benefit from Snap's ability to enable tighter interdisciplinary and extended enterprise workflows that tie collaborative customer, supply chain, and product lifecycle management initiatives with ongoing plant-floor efficiency efforts, Ward pointed out.
The first four Dynamics Snap components reflect this:
- Timesheet Snap-In, which allows Outlook users to view or submit time entries for tasks that are performed on a periodic basis and tracked within Dynamics AX 3.0
- Vacation Management Snap-In, which enables Outlook users to submit vacation requests managed within Dynamics AX 3.0
- Business Data Lookup Snap-In for Dynamics AX, which allows knowledge workers to use the Dynamics AX task pane to search and browse ERP data using Word, Excel, or Outlook, and to copy selected data into Office 2003 documents or attach these documents to Dynamics AX records
- Business Data Lookup Snap-In for Dynamics CRM, which allows users to search and browse Dynamics CRM 3.0 data from within Word, Excel, and Outlook.
MBS is initially tying Snap to Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta) and Dynamics CRM for good reason, AMR's Shepherd said. "Dynamics AX is the key to [Microsoft's ERP] future ... it's the most modern in terms of architecture and most comprehensive in terms of functionality," he pointed out. Microsoft is also looking to capitalize on Dynamics CRM 3.0's
market momentum after delaying its release in early 2005. "One reason [for its success] ... is the level of integration with Office that it already has built in, which creates more differentiation with salesforce.com," Shepherd noted.
Going forward, MBS' Nadella said the business unit plans later this year to deliver additional collaborative applications with new releases of Microsoft Dynamics and with the next generation of Office. He didn't offer any specifics.
MBS officials made a concerted effort to differentiate Snap from Mendocino. Although Snap echoes the time and vacation management found in Mendocino, Microsoft's offering, Nadella said in prepared remarks, provides "in-context business data lookup in Microsoft Office programs."
Another difference he noted is that Microsoft is making Snap available as "a shared source initiative" to enable Microsoft's independent software development and reseller partners to build and customize Snap component solutions for their customers.
Snap components are available for free (under the Microsoft Permissive License) via download at
GotDotNet.com.
Shepherd isn't surprised that Microsoft stole SAP's thunder on the enterprise/personal productivity interoperability march. The reason: it's easier to engineer and test code that snaps into Office and interacts with Dynamics CRM and Dynamics AX, two Microsoft-architected products. "[It] didn't require the same kind of extended beta testing that they are putting Mendocino through."