SAP Delivers for the Mailman
448511
Neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night can keep the US Postal Service from its appointed rounds, but a 25-year-old Human Resources software system is apparently stopping the mailman in his tracks.
281287
OCTOBER 07, 2004  - Looking to penetrate further into the software infrastructure market, applications vendor SAP AG is rolling out a new set of Java and business intelligence enhancements to its NetWeaver middleware and integration stack.
124509
DECEMBER 15, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - SAP AG said today that it&#39;s offering customers a new service to ensure the security of SAP systems.
725335
SAP&#160;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&#160;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&#39;s Tech Ed conference said this week.At the same time, SAP is stepping up its efforts with Adobe Systems&#160;to let developers liven up SAP interfaces using Adobe&#39;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 industrywide trend to bring enterprise software to a wider range of business users.SAP&#39;s standard interfaces are often seen as functional, but not very imaginative or easy to use.&quot;Anything that improves SAP&#39;s interfaces, which are hideous and hard to use, is a good thing,&quot; said James Governor, an industry analyst with RedMonk.Duet allows workers to view &quot;contextual&quot; 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.&quot;It&#39;s really the information we think people want, based on our experience and best practices,&quot; 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&#39;s human-resources software, such as the employee&#39;s sales figures, absentee record or current pay scale.The capability should help to deliver on the original promise of Duet, Ferber-Harel said. &quot;Part of our original vision was to give you the information you need to make decisions, and you can&#39;t make decisions without the right information,&quot; 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&#160;AIR technology, a recent addition to Adobe&#39;s Flex development environment. AIR is seen as a rival to Microsoft&#39;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&#39;t be synchronized with the data in Excel, however.AIR is available today for the Windows and Mac operating systems and will &quot;very soon&quot; 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&#39;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&#39;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.&quot;Culturally, the SAP people are totally different from those in the Microsoft Exchange world,&quot; he told Tech Ed attendees. &quot;You have to bring together two groups of people who would not normally talk to each other.&quot;
420399
SAP is offering a new service called SAP Security Optimization, which provides a detailed analysis of security gaps and vulnerabilities and action plans on how to resolve them.
165741
Microsoft is turning the software into what it hopes will be a one-stop shop for e-mail, voice mail and faxes.
356689
Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services plans to train over 1,500 staff over the next two years on software and technologies from business software vendor SAP in a move to meet growing demand worldwide for consultants certified on SAP software.
640659
The company is looking to reach out to the community of users of its software by building a mailing list of those interested in beta testing software.
700152
By Cynthia McMullen  Last week, I received nearly 700 e-mails, give or take a few spam.  That's a joke; spam accounts for nearly 90 percent of the e-mail I receive at work. And I don't mean the Hormel meat product, Spam, for whom unsolicited commercial mail was named.
316370
(InfoWorld) - Delivering on a promise made earlier this year, SAP has unveiled the first set of products to help businesses meet their compliance requirements, in addition to announcing a marketing agreement with Cisco Systems. The three new governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) applications, based on SAP's new SOA (service-oriented architecture), offer companies help with repository, process control, and risk management functions, the Walldorf, Germany, company said Wednesday. In May, SAP announced theÂ creation of a new GRC business unitÂ at its Sapphire customer event in Orlando. The unit was set up to develop new technology to help companies meet a growing list of compliance requirements, such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations for pharmaceutical companies, and Basel II regulations for the banking sector. The SAP GRC Repository application documents and maintains GRC information in a single central system, including corporate policies and regulations, and will also store and link risk and control libraries to multiple control frameworks and international regulations. The centralization of GRC information simplifies risk management, increases transparency and cuts costs associated with GRC initiatives, according to SAP. SAP GRC Process Control is designed to automatically aggregate business process risks for the entire company, provide supporting evidence of compliance and pinpoint control violations so that corrective action can be given a priority. The software integrates automated control monitoring for SAP and non-SAP applications. To help customers implement collaborative risk management processes, the SAP GRC Risk Management application provides a thorough analysis of key business risks at multiple levels of the company, across organization entities, business process and IT infrastructure, according to SAP. It is designed to help professional risk managers and company owners identify financial, legal and operational risks, analyze business opportunities in light of these and develop appropriate responses. SAP will sell all three products separately. The repository and process control applications will ship Nov. 30, with the risk management software product to follow in December. In addition, SAP has signed a joint marketing agreement with Cisco that will target GRC business processes and IT control issues across the entire IT infrastructure, including the network and application layers. Under the agreement, targeted at the U.S. and Canada, the companies will collaborate in sales and marketing activities, and provide complementary products that offer new levels of IT management and controls between Cisco's service-oriented network architecture (SONA) and SAP's three new GRC applications. Further information about the products isÂ available here.
718175
(InfoWorld) - SAP continued to ramp up its on-demand CRM offering this week, announcing that it will now include service-level capabilities, the third key component of CRM solutions. In February SAP kicked off its software as a service business with a sales force automation solution. In May the company added marketing, and in its third update within the year it is now announcing SAP Service. Liz Herbert, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that the SAP CRM solution is now displaying the kind of depth SAP is known for. "SAP added a component for managing products that many on-demand CRM vendors don't have. You can use it as the product master or bring in the product master which is typically found in the ERP system," said Herbert. The new service component includes Service Ticket Management, Rule-based Service Ticket Distribution, and Service Level Monitoring. Also included is a rules-base service-level determination calculator that automates the routing of service tickets based on a customer's service level agreement, said Angela Bandlow, vice president at CRM Solutions Marketing. "It's a tiered service that tracks SLAs based on the customer and the required response time," said Bandlow. One of the key differentiators for the SAP offering, according to both Bandlow and Forrester's Herbert, is its ability to integrate easily with MySAP ERP systems on the back end. Using product information found in the ERP system, a sales person can pull up manufacturing availability and pricing information and deliver a quote in real time online. Bandlow said while this completes the three major components of SAP CRM OnDemand, quarterly updates can be expected with the next update due in December. To date, the solution, like almost all on-demand solutions, is not industry-specific. But Bandlow said the company is looking at that and will respond to customer demand.
614969
Business software maker SAP aims to  win about 1,000 customers for its new Web-delivered software  aimed at smaller companies by the end of 2008, according to  slides due to be presented on Wednesday.
267797
Final version is expected this month; software will compete with Outlook express.
272559
AUGUST 23, 2004  - The US Postal Service is about to get a $35 million Web-based human resources application makeover, courtesy of Germany-based applications vendor SAP AG.
491648
SAP has launched SAP Security Optimization, a service that evaluates a customer&#39;s SAP system to identify and eliminate potential vulnerabilities and minimize the risk of intrusions.
382861
ERP and CRM suite, including eCommerce, inventory, warehouse, order, customer management, general ledger, MRP, POS. Database independent service-oriented architecture (SOA).   The opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM application suite released version 1.0.0 Preview 5 today.  There have been over 1,300 commits since the release of Preview 4 at the end of July.  Significant enhancements include:  * Integration of Pentaho business intelligence suite into opentaps for integrated reporting * Integration of newer JasperReports modules * Ebay and Amazon.com order integration * Support for paychecks and payroll features * Integrated postal address validation in CRM module and support for bulk postal mailing labels * New Ajax pagination tool * Screens for customer, commission, and vendor agreements and contracts * Cash drawer for tracking cash transactions * Credit limits feature * Improvements throughout the order entry, warehouse, and purchasing applications.  In addition, an online manual for opentaps is now available at:  http://www.opentaps.org/docs  As opentaps 1.0.0 is still under active development, all users and developers should use subversion's svn update to stay up to date.   opentaps is an open source Java ERP and CRM system which is compatible with Windows and Linux and all major databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and MS SQL Server.  opentaps can be downloaded from SourceForge.net at:  http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=145855
480087
TechWeb - SAP AG unveils a search application capable of delivering results pulled from across corporate business systems to either a browser-based or desktop user interface.