SAP looks to Microsoft, Adobe for friendlier UI

SAP AG is pushing ahead with two partnerships that aim to provide customers with better user interface options for its ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.

SAP and Microsoft Corp. plan to announce an upgrade in the coming weeks to their Duet software, version 1.5, which will be generally available early next year, officials at SAP's Tech Ed conference said this week.

At the same time, SAP is stepping up its efforts with Adobe Systems Inc. to let developers liven up SAP interfaces using Adobe's new AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technology, for building rich Web applications that run outside of a browser.

Both projects, on show at TechEd in Munich, Germany, aim to expand the number of employees who access SAP applications and data. The partnerships are also part of an industry-wide trend to bring enterprise software to a wider range of business users.

SAP's standard interfaces are often seen as functional, but not very imaginative or easy to use.

"Anything that improves SAP's interfaces, which are hideous and hard to use, is a good thing," said James Governor, an industry analyst with RedMonk LLC.

Duet allows workers to view "contextual" SAP data that might help them make business decisions from within Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Excel. In the current version, that contextual data is limited to what SAP and Microsoft chose to provide for a given task.

"It's really the information we think people want, based on our experience and best practices," said Yifat Ferber-Harel, a Duet product manager with SAP.

Version 1.5 of the product will include tools that allow developers to choose the contextual data they want to present to end users.

For example, a big company might set up a process for approving promotions using Microsoft Outlook. When a senior manager receives an e-mail from a department head suggesting a promotion, a developer will be able to provide related information from SAP's human-resources software, such as the employee's sales figures, absentee record or current pay scale.

The capability should help to deliver on the original promise of Duet, Ferber-Harel said. "Part of our original vision was to give you the information you need to make decisions, and you can't make decisions without the right information," she said.

The update will also add more user scenarios, the business cases in which Duet can be used. Today they include areas such as leave management and budget planning.

At the same time, SAP is working with Adobe on its AIR technology, a recent addition to Adobe's Flex development environment. AIR is seen as a rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer because developers can use it to build applications with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flash that can on a the desktop instead of in a Web browser.

SAP has just developed its first application based entirely on Flex, called Spend Analytics, for aggregating and analyzing spend data, said Matthias Zeller, a senior Adobe product manager, in a presentation at Tech Ed.

Spend Analytics includes a tool called Briefing Book, for capturing snapshots of data that can be shared with other managers. Briefing Book is already unusual for an SAP interface, appearing as an actual book rendered virtually on the screen. The tool is usually viewed in a browser, but Adobe has developed a proof-of-concept version with AIR.

Zeller showed how users can drag and drop data-views from Briefing Book onto the desktop for offline use -- something not possible in Internet Explorer. And it lets a user work with spend data in Excel, to create a forecast, for example, and then drag that data into Briefing Book. The AIR interface can't be synchronized with the data in Excel, however.

AIR is available today for the Windows and Mac operating systems and will "very soon" be available for Linux, Zeller said. Spend Analytics is available now to some SAP customers and should be generally available in the first quarter next year.

Customers looking at the technologies should consider that AIR is still in beta, while Duet has been in the market since June 2006. That said, Adobe and SAP have been working together on interactive forms for SAP since 2002. IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes group also develops client interfaces for SAP.

Microsoft and SAP are increasingly rivalrous in the business applications area, and for that reason SAP may find Adobe an easier partner to work with, Red Monk's Governor said. (RedMonk does consulting work for SAP and Adobe.) In addition, companies might not always find it easy to bring teams of SAP and Microsoft engineers together, said Alan Rickayzen, an SAP senior product manager.

"Culturally, the SAP people are totally different from those in the Microsoft Exchange world," he told Tech Ed attendees. "You have to bring together two groups of people who would not normally talk to each other."