… a new coat of paint on an old concept. In so many ways, Microsoft has really cool technology that no one knows about. What Microsoft is now calling ‘office business applications’ is a perfect example. Until recently, they’ve tried to sell this to the market, and the partner community at ‘Smart Clients’. At our firm, we didn’t liek that moniker, so we’ve taken to calling our services around that same thing ‘Office Application Integration’. Whatever you call it, I’m excited that Microsoft has at least taken another stab at trying to sell the capabilities that are inherent to Microsoft Office in a new way.
What Microsoft has done such a terrible job at is communicating the breadth of capabilities available to Office users regarding integrating their Office applications to their current line of business applications. In our recent experience, this has meant integrating Outlook into a client’s Siebel CRM system or a custom Java-based, Oracle database, application. Microsoft has also packaged this up around one line of business app, SAP, and launched their DUET project in the past year.
However you dress this up, it means a dramatic ability to disconnect data from line of business applications and get that data to a user through a familiar, commonly used application, such as Outlook, Excel, Word, etc. We’re finding clients who have these behemouth systems very interested in talking about this for reasons I’ll be explaining in future posts.
