Well, why not Duet?

It seems to me that it was time I spoke about some of the things that I do like about Duet from SAP and Microsoft. No, it isn't a change of heart - I still think Duet has a long way to go before it delivers on what people expect it to be - but there are several things that are right about it.

For one, Duet is right in providing a solution to the friction between the workflow-enabled-business-process SAP world and the personal colloboration based Outlook world. It helps a user perform work flow transactions from within Outlook. It helps users look up data, compare it with previous history, and finally, complete the transaction from right within Outlook, and have it reflected in SAP.

Secondly, Duet does a decent job in providing the context sensitive data elements along side the automated e-mail generated, so that the user can effortlessly do the job. Further, it intuits the users context reasonably well with its integration with Outlook objects, and succeeds in providing a reasonably intuitive delivery of information.

Thirdly, the experience is seamless, and yes, it does look pretty. Prettier than SAP screens.

If Duet could connect to more data sources besides SAP, and enable users to build their own pathways inside Outlook and enable their work-flows, it would be loved by CIOs and users alike, notwithstanding its heavy middleware and upgrade costs.

-Sangeeta

Duet is not doing as well as it should be...

Someone called it the Duet sad song!

It is now out in the open. Steve Ballmer acknowledged at the keynote for Software 2007 that Duet has not done as well as it was expected to.

Not surprising. Afterall, Duet could connect only to latest versions of SAP- AND could work only with Office 2003+ versions - AND had no development framework - AND required a whole bunch of middeware from SAP and Microsoft both - AND enabled only a few limited value packs that enabled a handful of SAP transactions though Office. With all that onerous bunch of software under its hood, and the steep upgrades it needed, Duet really did deliver too little.

So, what could happen next? Would Duet be given a quiet burial - or would it be re-packaged and re-sold as a newly christened Office Business Application aka OBA, this time around only by Microsoft, and only with Microsoft stack? Something tells me that it would be the latter.

Could it be that Microsoft just used Duet as a pilot for its own OBA run? Nasty of me.

-Sangeeta

Just take this Duet Quiz!

I came across this interesting quiz on Duet. It tells you a lot of facts about Duet that are sometimes glossed over in sales colleterals and demos. There are some interesting ones as well.

Just to share - I got 8 out of the 10 questions right! Duet-watcher as I am, I still discovered a few things. Like I did not know that Duet required 1G of disk space.

Well well, we live and learn, don't we?

- Sangeeta

Things Vendors do - Hope that does not happen with Duet

Check out this link for a strip from Dilbert Comic. What a take on vendors and lock-ins!

Let us see the product road map for Duet. Value packs to be delivered in the future, Development tools to be delivered in the future, Excel connectivity to be delivered in the future...Hmmmmm, Makes one uncomfortable, does it not?

- Sangeeta