SAP and Microsoft .NET interoperability

It may come as a surprise to know that a Microsoft team is resident in Waldorf, and a SAP team in Redmond. Microsoft actually run SAP as their own ERP system, so there is no doubt a lot of very interesting proprietary code in Redmond joining the two together.

The most famous output of this partnership is the new Duet product suite which anyone familiar to traditional SAP interfaces will be very excited about - seamless integration into Microsoft Outlook. For example, when you want to book holiday leave in Outlook, it connects to SAP HR to show how many days leave remain. If you complete the booking a leave request is automatically submitted for approval. Things like that have serious value, and it looks good too.

Duet leverages and enhances the relatively unknown Microsoft Office Information Bridge (IBF) to provide data on demand to the respective Office TaskPane. Unfortunately we have to wait until at least next year for the PDK that lets third parties develop in that technology.

We are also waiting for an updated .NET connector. The current SAP Connector for Microsoft .NET (NCO) version 2.0 only works with Visual Studio 2003. According to Rohr, Meigen and Fischer (p95), SAP "is considering" a plug-in for Visual Studio 2005. This would be called the Enterprise Services Explorer for .NET. Please comment if you know any more about dates for this. In the mean time, we are developing our own interoperability framework with store and forward capabilities and tightly bound controls.