Microsoft to Add Office Link to Its Dynamics ERP Apps
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Microsoft plans to introduce a tool to let users access its ERP applications through Office or SharePoint, along with other products, at its Convergence user group conference this week.
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Attendees at the Microsoft 2008 Office System Developer Conference this week are leveraging development capabilities in Office System, but cite issues such as getting used to the new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the 2007 Office release.A sampling of attendees at the San Jose, Calif. event revealed mostly satisfaction with Office System. Most were Microsoft business partners developing applications for Microsoft's SharePoint platform for collaboration and business processes."I bought into it. I'm drinking the KoolAid," said Jeff Modzel, technical architect for SunGard Higher Education."Our customers are colleges and universities and their constituents, which are students. Kids very much want collaborative environments for their classes. SharePoint's an easy solution to that problem," Modzel said.He described Office System as an "excellent" development platform, although he noted difficulties in writing an Excel 2007 add-in prior to getting the newly released Visual Studio 2008 platform.The new ribbon-based Fluent UI in the Office package takes some getting used to, Modzel said. "The first handful of times I used it, I did not like it and the more I used it the more I liked it," he said.Consultants at developer OTB Solutions also mentioned issues with the ribbon. The people who hate it the most are the people who are very familiar with the old Office platform, said Dick Federle, consultant at OTB.? But he still likes the feature. "The neat thing about the ribbon is since it?s context-sensitive, you're only seeing what's important for what you're looking at, at the time, said Federle.Another consultant at OTB gave the ribbon a thumbs-up. "It's become familiar. You can use it and extend it," said OTB consultant Jen Glass.OTB has been using SharePoint as an application development platform. "We saw with the new SharePoint platform that it was actually ready for enterprise applications," Federle said. For example, OTB has developed a health insurance claims auditing system that processes more than 1.5 million transactions a month, he said.Developers, though, must adapt to using configuration capabilities in SharePoint rather than resort to coding, Federle said. "There are a lot of capabilities and a lot of problems you can solve with SharePoint through configuration without having to write any code," he said.At FirstBank, the company is currently running Office XP and is looking to migrate to Visual Studio Tools for Office and Office 2007, said Greg Mestas, distributed applications manager at the company.While features such as the ribbon UI in Office 2007 may make things easier for developers, Mestas is not so sure what the benefit is for end users."Most of our people use Word and Excel, and Word and Excel are still Word and Excel," Mestas said. "They've had a lot of the same features release over release. So the biggest benefit for us [in migrating] is staying on a supported platform, to put it bluntly," he said.The bank is starting a pilot project on SharePoint for office automation. "We're trying to get rid of all that paper and all that manual process and create some workflows and InfoPath forms as a replacement," Mestas said.An official at SharePoint applications developer Consejo applauded Microsoft's Open XML document initiative as a benefit for Office application development."Their whole Open XML is proving to be very comforting to most developers because in the old days, when it was binary, that not necessarily ideal," said Virgil Pate, development manager at Consejo.Also, the ribbon UI makes it simpler to modify the user interface, he said. But Microsoft could have done a better job in migrating users to the ribbon, Pate stressed.Recalling his company's experience with SharePoint, Pate said it is easy to get started developing extensions, but support has been slow, he said.Pate expressed caution about the Office Live platform, in which Microsoft offers online versions of software. While calling Office Live a great idea, Pate wondered about its security and reliability. "If they ever start to go down or start to have lag time, it's going to hurt them," he said.Another developer, Marcin Geborik, of developer Computer Plus of Krakow, Poland, cited good experiences in developing for SharePoint but found difficulty in working with Microsoft Office Project Server."As a matter of fact, Project Server's API is just not good," Geborik said.Meanwhile, Microsoft with version 2 of Office Live Small Business this week restructured the offering, providing users with a free domain for the first year as well as a free Web site. After the first year, the domain costs $14.95.?Subscribers get 100 free e-mail accounts each with 2-2.5GB of storage, as well as services such as contact management.Also, Microsoft with its Unified Communications platform plans to bulk it up with instant messaging capabilities that can find persons linked in a workflow chain.
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Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is opening the door to its Office suite, offering governments a closer look inside key applications.
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Microsoft outlined a new feature that will be included in Office 2008 for Mac.
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Microsoft Corp., the world&#39;s biggest software company, said it will make the source code for its Office 2003 software available as part of a government security program.
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Microsoft is offering a new subscription model to small businesses that will allow them to use the company&#39;s software for less cost than the currently available licensing model.The plan, called Open Value Subscription program, is part of Microsoft&#39;s effort to give small businesses more flexible and affordable options for purchasing software, said Cindy Bates, Microsoft&#39;s general manager for U.S. small business.The new plan costs about a third of the license-only expense for the current licensing program open to small business, called the Open Value program, Bates said. The plan is cheaper because Microsoft offers upfront discounts for software purchased through the subscription program, and also allows customers to increase or decrease pricing over the three-year subscription period if their business needs change, she said.Open Value Subscription includes Microsoft&#39;s Software Assurance program, the company&#39;s software maintenance and support program for business customers.Microsoft defines small businesses as those with 50 employees or fewer. Bates called 50 employees the &quot;break point&quot; for when a company hires IT management. Up until that number, &quot;usually it&#39;s the business owner or office manager&quot; handling the IT system, she said.Businesses will be able to sign up for the Open Value Subscription program beginning in March, Bates said. Microsoft products available through the program include Microsoft Office Small Business, Office Professional +, Windows Vista Business Upgrade, Small Business Server Client Access License (CAL), Core CAL, Desktop Professional Suite, and Small Business Desktop Suite.As part of its small-business outreach, Microsoft also this week is unveiling a partner program called &quot;Big Easy,&quot; which invests about $10 million in subsidies to small businesses purchasing products through partners.Through the program, small businesses purchasing certain products through authorized specialist partners will get a certain percentage of money back that they can use to purchase other services from those partners, Bates said.For example, a small business would get a maximum of 22 percent of the money it spends if it buys six or more products that are on the approved list. Bates said Microsoft has figured the average return will be about 15 percent to 17 percent on purchases for small businesses.Products available for subsidies under the Big Easy program include Microsoft Office products, Exchange Server, Forefront Security for Exchange Server, System Center Essentials, Project, Visio, Office SharePoint Server, Forefront Security for SharePoint, and Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006, among others.More information about Open Value Subscription can be found on Microsoft&#39;s Web site. The company also provides more information about the Big Easy on its Microsoft Small Business Community Blog.
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Redmond software company Microsoft Corp. said it will add the source code of its Office 2003 flagship software suite to its program for sharing the details of its products with government entities.
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A new add-on for Office Project Server 2003 includes tools for connecting to HR software from SAP.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft continues to prepare for the third-quarter launch of its&#160;Dynamics Live CRM service&#160;with Tuesday&#39;s announcement of initial pricing and product information.
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New version of Microsoft Office for small businesses to include more accounting and customer information features.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ has been quietly adding to the cache of reference applications it hopes will help transform Microsoft Office 2007 from a mere productivity suite to a collaboration tool. Aiming to help users access data from various enterprise sources through the most common Office tools, Microsoft hasÂ created add-ons to Office 2007Â that it calls Office Business Applications, or OBAs. They add business processes and intelligence to applications such as Excel and Outlook. Last week, the company quietly unveiled an OBA reference application designed for the health-care industry, and the company is gearing up to make OBAs a core focus at its Worldwide Partner Conference, which will be held next week in Denver. Microsoft hopes partners and customers will enhance the existing Office applications to take advantage of data and processes stored on the back end -- in places such as SQL Server and CRM and ERP applications, said Daz Wilkin, a program manager for Microsoft's platform strategy group, in an interview in New York this week. Microsoft built Office 2007 and created tie-ins to Microsoft server software such as SQL Server specifically with this in mind. To help companies build OBAs, Microsoft has been releasing reference applications that provide technical documentation and information on how to build the new functionality using Office 2007. The reference application released last week, Consumer Engagement Reference Architecture for Health Plans, details how health care providers and employers can work together to connect employees with personal trainers using Microsoft Office and Microsoft server software. The key to the application is how easily it can automate schedules using Office applications such as Outlook, Wilkin said. Improved communication lets a personal trainer handle more clients than he or she normally could, Wilkin said. Microsoft is encouraging partners to build OBAs as well, since they have already been building custom functionality to help business users access data stores through front-end applications such as the ones in Office, Wilkin said. "People have been able to do this in the past, but now it's a lot better and easier," he said. Still, Microsoft's current explanation of OBAs is confusing to some of its business partners. "I don't think it's been articulated clearly what OBAs are yet," said one source whose company works with Microsoft and who asked not to be named. He suggested that OBAs and the links between Office 2007 and back-end applications such as SQL Server and Dynamics CRM are Microsoft's way of making Office more of a platform on which companies can build other applications. That could differentiate it from competitive Office suites such as OpenOffice.org, he said. Other companies that have been working with Microsoft on OBAs seem to have a better idea of how Microsoft hopes they will work. Construction management company Skanska USA Building Inc. has built an OBA on top of the forthcoming Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 business-intelligence package. Skanska has been a pilot user of PerformancePoint for more than a year. Microsoft on Tuesday released a Community Technology Preview of PerformancePoint, which combines existing and new products such as Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager and business intelligence products the company acquired from ProClarity. The final version of the product is slated to be available by the end of September. Allen Emerick, director of information for applications and integration at Skanska, said his company is using an OBA it built that combines Office Excel and PerformancePoint to budget and forecast construction projects. Previously, the company used Excel on the front end but had to build an XML (Extensible Markup Language) integration layer between Excel and various Microsoft-based data stores in the back end to achieve the same effect. "Before, we had to do a lot of work to access the data," he said. More information about OBAs can be found on the MSN portal dedicated to the technology.
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Microsoft Corp.  is planning to release a new version of its Office program for small businesses that handles accounting and customer management tasks, the world's largest software maker said on Friday.
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Microsoft and EMC will offer better integration between EMC's Documentum content management software and Office 2007.
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Microsoft announced a major support upgrade, clearer road maps, and a new financing option for its Dynamics range of business applications on Wednesday.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the Windows application platform is to be fitted with "Fluent UI" ribbon capabilities now offered in Office 2007.The ribbon UI presents a new interface in Office 2007. "We usability-tested it massively, and fortunatel, it has had a very strong positive reaction," Gates said during a keynote presentation the 2008 Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif. "We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent UI quite a bit across a number of applications," he said. "It turns out it's a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality."The Fluent UI represented "a major risk that Microsoft took," Gates said. But the older interface with its dropdown menus was hiding so much functionality that the company was being asked for features that were already there but were concealed, he said.At the conference, Microsoft is promoting Office as a development platform with users able to write extensions. During Gates's presentation, third party applications were shown that extended Office with custom development, such as the MindJet MindManager planning application and FedEx's QuickShip for processing FedEx shipments from within Microsoft Outlook.During a subsequent question-and-answer session with the audience, Gates was asked to compare and contrast opportunities for developers working with platforms like Microsoft's with platforms like open source. Gates responded, "Our platform is a commercial platform where customers expect a very high level of service, a very high level of integration, but the nice thing about it is they are willing to pay for software."Free software has always been around, he said. "We've always had free software out there, it's not really a new thing. In fact, I'd say in some ways it's less of a factor than it's ever been," Gates said.Everyone has the same business model, he said: Software developers have free versions of their software, inexpensive software, and robust commercial versions of their software. "The commercial environment, I think, will always be the pre-eminent thing in terms of providing business productivity," said Gates.He advised those who want to develop free software to be careful which licensing model they choose and to select an option that does not restrict commercial versions of their software.Asked about Yahoo, which has rejected Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition offer, Gates said the question was whether Yahoo should be a media company or focus on engineering. In an ad model, scale is needed, he said. Yahoo's engineering could be combined with what Microsoft has done, he said.Gates's overall presentation did not impress one attendee, who nonetheless was impressed with Gates himself."Bill is definitely a visionary, and he's one of the greatest men in the 20th century, but I have to wonder how much of that was just reading from a script," said Aaron Alanen, senior consultant at Sogeti."I did see in his questions later on that he really had some deeper knowledge," Alanen said.During Gates's presentation, he also played a tongue-in-cheek video about what he would do during his upcoming semi-retirement from Microsoft. Included were possibilities such as getting into politics, joining the rock band U2, and becoming a rapper or actor. Guests featured in the video included, among others, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bono from U2, and George Clooney.
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Microsoft will likely join forces with SAP or pursue new targets in the enterprise application business in the aftermath of Oracle&#39;s acquisition of PeopleSoft, Microsoft partners say.
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Company joins project designed to bridge rival document formats and thus enable its OpenOffice customers to work with Microsoft Office.