SAP, Microsoft plan more Duet features and new version
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The two companies plan to release Duet 1.5 in mid-2007, in addition to "value packs" that include support for the 2007 Microsoft Office system over the next 12 months.
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Microsoft wants to make it easy for users to upgrade among editions of the next Windows.
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Although Microsoft won't announce the release date of the next version of its Exchange Server until next year, users can expect more management tools for existing versions in the meantime.
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Microsoft is planning to include the ability for developers to add Windows Live services to applications in the next version of Visual Studio.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP AG is making a major change in the way it delivers ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications to customers, breaking with the traditional approach of upgrading the entire software release every 12 to 18 months. Instead, SAP committed Tuesday to keeping the current version of its ERP software, mySAP ERP 2005, in place through 2010 and providing new functionality via a steady stream of optional enhancement packages. The vendor made the announcement at its TechEd developer conference taking place in Las Vegas this week. SAP determined the new strategy in response to customer demands, according to Peter Graf, executive vice president of solution marketing for SAP. "The customer is in a dilemma," he said. "They want the least distraction to their business possible, while continually innovating in a very short time frame." Not having to upgrade entire SAP ERP applications on a regular basis and being able to choose which functionality to take on via the optional enhancement packages should help ease the pain, Graf added. MySAP 2005 will act as "a stable backbone" on top of which customers can add new functionality from SAP and its partners, Graf said. It's a very different approach from the several hundred product enhancements the vendor showcased in mySAP ERP 2005, he added. The first enhancement package is due to ship in December. It will include new functionality around talent management and financial collaboration, new composite applications, enterprise services, industry-specific capabilities and possible extensions to SAP's NetWeaver integration platform, Graf said. MySAP is based on NetWeaver. Going forward, SAP will likely issue enhancement packages once every quarter or two, with each package grouped around a particular theme. "We'll make sure we deliver them in a very focused way," Graf said. "For example, we'd say this package is all around talent management. If you want it, go for it. If you're not interested, don't use it." Other enhancement packages will includeÂ CRM (customer relationship management)Â andÂ Project Muse, a new GUI (graphical user interface) to mySAP applications developed through a partnership with Adobe Systems Inc.'s Macromedia business unit. SAP begun making mySAP ERP 2005 generally available in May at its Sapphire user conference in Orlando. So far, 200 to 300 customers are live with the latest ERP software version, Graf said, with several thousand other users live on the earlier release, mySAP 2004. SAP is hoping that users on older versions of its software, notably R/3 4.6C and 4.7, will also rapidly move to mySAP ERP 2005. While the message at Sapphire from SAP executives to its users was to adopt mySAP 2005 sooner rather than later, the message from TechEd is rather more blunt. "There's no mySAP ERP 2007. This is it. Move," Graf said. Â
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Services and software companies IBM  and SAP , longtime technology partners, will bring out their first joint software product in the fourth quarter of this year, the two companies said on Monday.
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SAP AG  unveiled a  long-awaited line of Web-delivered software on Wednesday that  will radically change the company's business model and may  shake up the Internet software arena.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. next month plan to provide more details on work they are doing to make their products interoperable, a Sun executive said Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. hopes to boost the adoption of BPM (business process management) applications by adding support for Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) in the workflow layer of Windows Vista, the company said Monday. It also has formed an alliance of software vendors aimed at making BPEL a more mainstream technology. Microsoft plans to add support for BPEL in Vista's Workflow Foundation (WWF) through a March community technology preview called BPEL for WWF March CP. That CTP will implement the BPEL 1.1 specification currently available from the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), which oversees the standard. However, the final release of BPEL for WWF will implement BPEL 2.0 and should be released in the last quarter of the year, Microsoft said. OASIS has approved the BPEL 2.0 specification but is still preparing it for final release, according to its Web site. Microsoft and IBM combined two competing business process programming languages to form BPEL for Web Services, later shortened to BPEL, several years ago. In April 2003 those companies along with other vendors submitted BPEL to OASIS as a standard. In addition to adding support for BPEL into Windows, Microsoft also on Monday said it formed the Business Process Alliance, a group of companies that plans to help customers build BPM applications on Microsoft's software platform. Along with Microsoft, the companies that have joined the alliance are AmberPoint Inc., Ascentn Corp., IDS Scheer AG, Fair Isaac Corp., Global360, InRule Technology Inc., Metastorm Inc., PNMsoft Ltd., RuleBurst Ltd. and SourceCode Technology Holdings Inc. According to Microsoft, the adoption of BPM technology has been limited to only the largest Fortune 500 companies. The company hopes to change that by adding BPEL to Windows and recruiting independent software vendors to build technology on its platform. BPEL has not developed without criticism, however. BPEL is an executable language that orchestrates how business processes interact, and some feel that a language based on what developers call choreography is a better option. Orchestration controls events in a process centrally, while choreography sets up prearranged rules for those events, which some argue is more flexible for developers. Microsoft also supports BPEL in its BizTalk Server integration software.
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At Microsoft's annual conference for business partners, company executives said new versions of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio will be launched simultaneously next February.
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Microsoft plans on Tuesday to unveil what could be an industry-changing effort in application modeling and SOA with its "Oslo" project, which could significantly change the equation in the Windows application deployment space.Part of Oslo involves delivering a unified platform integrating services and modeling, Microsoft said. But instead of models describing the application, models are the applications themselves.Oslo is a codename for a set of technical investments that will be delivered in the next major versions of Microsoft's platform products, said Steven Martin, director of product management in the company's Connected Systems division. These products include Visual Studio, System Center, BizTalk Server, BizTalk Services, and the .Net Framework. Beta releases of Oslo technology are due in 2008."Oslo is a set of technologies that we think will help take model-driven design mainstream," Martin said.With Oslo, Microsoft is making investments aligned with a vision to simplify the effort needed to build, deploy, and manage composite applications within and across organizations. The effort builds on model-driven and service-enabled principles and extends SOA beyond the firewall.Release dates of Oslo-driven products have not been set. "This will make existing products we have better. Oslo doesn't have any new products. It's being injected into existing projects," Martin said.The products include:* Microsoft .Net Framework "4," which will further enable model-driven development within the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web services platform and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF).* Visual Studio "10," to follow the upcoming Visual 2008 package. Version 10 focuses on application lifecycle management with tools for model-driven design of distributed applications.* BizTalk Server "6," which will continue to offer technology for distributed SOA and BPM and include capabilities for composite applications.* BizTalk Services "1," which provides BizTalk capabilities within the cloud, will feature Web-based services for hosting composite applications that cross organizational boundaries. Advanced messaging, identity, and workflow will be featured.* Metadata repositories will be aligned across server and tools products, including System Center "5," Visual Studio "10," and BizTalk Server "6." Each will utilize repository technology for managing, versioning, and deployment models."System Center will be able to grab an application from the repository and deploy it easily without any intermediate steps," said Martin. Also, Microsoft anticipates that WCF and WWF will collapse into a single technology, he said.Analysts at Gartner called Oslo "ambitious.""It's pretty ambitious, and as a matter of fact, I believe we're not going to see anything concrete until well into 2008 and possibly 2009," said analyst Massimo Pezzini, vice president of the application platform strategies group at Gartner.Featured in Oslo are three fundamental components: a modeling environment, a business process server, including a significant evolution of BizTalk Server, and a new deployment model, Pezzini said.Oslo makes sense on paper, he said. "So far, there are only ideas and plans and prototypes, etc., so we have to see," said Pezzini.He added that he senses Oslo is mostly focused on enabling Microsoft Dynamics applications as work as enterprise applications via a SaaS (software as a service) model.Microsoft will need industry backing for Oslo to succeed, said analyst Nick Gall, vice president at Gartner."It's doubtful that it could really have the kind of major impact that I'm sure Microsoft and all of us would like to see unless they get the industry behind the approach," Gall said. Microsoft said it is evaluating whether to submit Oslo to an industry standards body and whether to seek industry-wide use of Oslo.SOA is related to Oslo because a services piece is offered, in which tooling and integration are improved with the .Net Framework. Also, there will be better connectivity to BizTalk Services, which provides Web-based services for messaging, identity, and workflow.Modeling, meanwhile, is important to application development, said Martin. Microsoft sees stumbling blocks with modeling as it is now: that modeling represents the application or business logic at a specific time, thus providing only a snapshot, and that models exist in isolation."Anytime you're looking at a model, you're only looking at a piece of the application because each of those models is separate," Martin said.Solving these problems involves taking modeling mainstream, he said. "Today, modeling is really only something that a select group of users and a select group of companies can do," said Martin.Whether a user is designing, developing, or deploying applications, Oslo "will simplify your job," Martin stressed.Microsoft's approach is not about Unified Modeling Language (UML), a technology of which Microsoft has not been a big supporter. But UML is a great example of a modeling language and Microsoft wants to unify its approach to modeling in general, Martin said.A modeling language is part of Oslo, but Microsoft is building a modeling language, a set of tools, and a unified repository. Microsoft's modeling language provides a way to unify existing modeling languages, similar to Microsoft's Common Language Runtime for application development.Oslo expands beyond UML to cover deployment and management, which UML does not address, Pezzini said.Key to Microsoft's effort is a unified metadata repository. Users get a view of a model being pulled out of this repository, Martin said. Deployment and policy information, workflow, and rules are maintained in one location, to prevent loss of data useful when deploying and managing an application or writing business rules against it."We think this will allow a much broader set of users to collaborate on applications," Martin said. "We think the process of building applications will be more efficient when anybody can see the application holistically."If Microsoft is successful with its plan to have application components automatically deployed based on models in the repository, it will be "a very huge benefit for the IT operations," said Pezzini.Microsoft is making available tools and guidance to take advantage of "real-world SOA." Featured are SOA resources from Microsoft and industry partners. Meanwhile, the new Microsoft SOA and Business Process Solution Center offers resources such as patterns and practices based on customer implementations.Microsoft's approach to SOA is to start out with a business problem and build services. The company will continue to work with partners such as AmberPoint and SOA Software to help round out SOA offerings, said Martin.Also at the conference, Microsoft plans to demonstrate an upcoming technology preview of BizTalk Services, with additional support for interoperability, Web 2.0 services, identity standards, and workflow in the cloud.The Oslo vision will be the subject of a keynote by Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference in Redmond, Wash., on Tuesday morning. Microsoft's SOA strategy will be covered in the presentation.
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Microsoft and Sun Microsystems on December 1 will deliver a joint update on their collaborations pursuant to an April 2004 technology-sharing agreement to boost interoperability between the two vendorsâ products, according to a Microsoft representative on Wednesday.
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Software maker expected to make leadership changes in Windows and online services units. Two prominent outside hires are expected to be looking for new opportunities.
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Microsoft used a Seattle conference to show off some features of the next version of Project.
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Microsoft in the fall will launch the latest version of its performance management product, offering it up as a key link in its ambitious DSI (Dynamic Systems Initiative) plan to reduce IT complexity by improving software and hardware manageability.
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Microsoft is set to unveil the latest version of its media playback software on Thursday, giving its partners powerful new tools for selling digital entertainment services even as it launches its own music download store.
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Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.