Background

Today's companies need to enhance their business performance, in particular, organizational productivity and process compliance. Traditionally, SAP® applications are utilized by only a subset of the information workers in an organization. As a result, the majority of information workers remain disconnected from and out of synch with companies’ best practices and most accurate information sources. Decision making, compliance, and data accuracy are all impaired, and companies suffer corporate-wide productivity deficiencies.

In 2005, SAP and Microsoft set out to deliver on a historic initiative: To increase the visibility and use of critical business processes and data by creating a unified link between their widely spread SAP Business Suite and Microsoft Office applications. This groundbreaking collaboration is designed to revolutionize the way information workers access and interact with enterprise applications. Without training, every Office user can use SAP software everyday.

The joint product – Duet software for Microsoft Office and SAP – enables information workers to interact quickly and easily with SAP business processes and data through familiar and easy-to-use Office applications.

Specifically, Duet enables customers to:

• Increase corporate policy compliance – Duet simplifies employees’ ability to interact with business processes and data that enables consistent and proper use of corporate policies.
• Improve decision making – By bringing together the worlds of business-productivity applications and enterprise applications, Duet provides employees and managers with simple and timely access to relevant, contextual business information.
• Save time and money – Duet increases the return on investment (ROI) of enterprise software implementations by reducing employee training costs and accelerating user adoption.

Key Functionality

The first version of Duet (1.0) will provide the following business scenarios:

• Budget monitoring: Gives managers seamless access to the financial data they need to make better decisions.
• Time management: Enables employees to record work and billable hours using their Microsoft Outlook calendar, and automatically synchronizes and updates Outlook appointments with the SAP ERP application for enterprise resource planning.
• Leave management: Enables employees to submit personal leave requests and handle management approvals processes through Outlook, thereby enabling data synchronization and process compliance between the desktop and SAP ERP.
• Organization management: Allows employees and managers to access organization information and human resources-related tasks in the familiar Outlook environment.

In the second half of 2006, SAP and Microsoft plan to release two Duet value packs that will extend the capabilities of Duet by delivering five additional scenarios:

Value Pack 1

• Recruitment management: Enables business managers and HR managers to collaboratively schedule candidate interviews, capture feedback and generate candidate ranks to automate selection.
• Travel management: Allows business managers and employees to reduce the costs of complying with corporate travel policies by making air/hotel/car bookings directly through Outlook in a fully self-sufficient manner.
• Analytics: Provides employees at all levels convenient access to scheduled and event-driven data reports through Outlook and Microsoft Excel, as well as the ability to drill down to key performance metrics through personalized views.

Value Pack 2

• Sales management: Enables sales executives to improve the quality of customer communications and drive faster deal closures by managing key account activities including appointments, contact updates and workflow approvals, all through Outlook
• Purchasing management: Allows procurement professional to realize faster approval cycles and reduced operating costs through fully compliant purchase order notifications, routing and approvals within Outlook

Technical Requirements

Duet 1.0 leverages the latest technologies from SAP and Microsoft, supporting:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Office 2003 Professional licenses
• mySAP ERP 2004 (or higher) with employee user license

Duet Road Map

• April 2005: SAP and Microsoft announce their first ever joint development project
• December 2005: Early releases go to 50 preview customers and partners
• June 2006: Duet 1.0 will be shipped globally
• Q3/2006: SAP and Microsoft will deliver value pack 1, with additional language support for German, French, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as enhanced platform capabilities
• Q4/2006: SAP and Microsoft will deliver value pack 2, including Microsoft Office 2007 support

Additional information about Duet software for Microsoft Office and SAP can be found at:

http://www.sap.com/duet/ and www.duet.com

Copyright © 2006 SAP AG
SAP, R/3, mySAP, mySAP.com, xApps, xApp, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data contained in this document serves informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary.

For more information, press only:

Lindsey Held, +1 (650) 320-3542, lindsey.held@sap.com, PDT
SAP Press Office, +1 (610) 661-3200, press@sap.com, EDT
Rachel Allen, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (415) 591-4041, PST, rachel_allen@sfo.bm.com, PDT
Uwe Schaad, Burson-Marsteller, +49 (69) 23809-31, uwe_schaad@de.bm.com, CET