Five Killer Trends that Would Redefine Business Apps

Continued from page: 1

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Office Suites as Front-ends to Business Apps

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Office suites are the most widely used applications across all enterprises. What makes them popular is their ease of use. You don't need any prior expertise or a formal training to get started on them. Compare this to an enterprise business application, like ERP or CRM, or even a banking application for that matter. They are complex and require plenty of training to be used.

You can enter the path for Reports Library in the File name box. The Excel Services option can be used to set the sheets to be displayed on Dashboard

What if these two worlds could meet and be integrated? What if the backend business applications joined hands with the front end office applications? This is one trend that's really catching up. Applications of an office suite such as MS Office have an easy to use interface, making it an apt front end for complex business applications.

Key benefits
This trend actually makes sense due to many reasons. For one, it reduces the learning curve required for training users on new applications. Since they're working on a familiar front-end, they would require lesser time to learn how to use it as a front-end to a business application.

It would also increase employee productivity. Instead of wasting time in toggling between an ERP, CRM application, they would continue to use Word, Excel, or some other similar application to access the back-end business apps.

There are already some ready examples available of this. Excel for instance, can be used as an interface for analyzing reports generated by an ERP or CRM application. Microsoft's Outlook calendar can be used to report time in a SAP application.

Some examples
Many things are happening to make the integration of office suites with back-end business applications a reality. Microsoft for instance has joined hands with SAP to provide one such solution. It's a solution called DUET, which is aimed at making MS Office as the front end for SAP's ERP and CRM offerings.

Likewise, Microsoft's SharePoint Server is another application that can be integrated with many others. Let's first look at SharePoint, and how to integrate other applications into its dashboard.Subsequently, we'll explain DUET in more detail.

Integrating Excel worksheet to Dashboard with SharePoint Server
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides integrated enterprise-class capabilities like portal, BI, collaboration, etc that can help improve organizational effectiveness by connecting people, processes, and information across the boundaries, be it geographical or an organization's functional boundaries.

SharePoint Server 2007 provides several ways for collaboration among an enterprises' employees.

One of them is through content management and distribution.

Under this the employees can publish and share their documents. Using the SharePoint's dashboard on a webpage, an author can also integrate an Excel worksheet on the dashboard of a webpage.

Through this feature the author of the webpage would be able to serve his report from a central location to a team, department, or the whole organization whereby it can be viewed and tracked for progress or other performance metrics. This worksheet could be used to display just a snapshot of the report or as a whole. Other users with appropriate permissions can not only view but also modify the worksheet.

In the following article we will see how a Microsoft Excel 2007 worksheet can be added to the dashboard of a webpage on Office SharePoint Server 2007. The condition of adding a worksheet to a dashboard is that it can only be done with Microsoft Office Excel 2007 as only it has the support for publishing using Excel Services.

Saving an Excel workbook to SharePoint
A workbook can be uploaded directly from the Upload button on the SharePoint site, but it's advisable that you publish your Excel workbook by using Excel Services. To publish your workbook using Excel Services, select Publish option from the main Office Menu and then opt for Excel Services under Distribute the document.

On the File name box, give the path to the server along with the file name. In our case it's the path to the Reports Library in the Reports Center site. Also in this dialog box select the button Excel Services Option, and in the following Window select the portion of the workbook that has to be displayed within the dashboard area.

After saving this setting, select the Document Type as Report from Choose Document Type dialog box. Finally select OK to publish the workbook and save that in the SharePoint document library.

Creating a Dashboard
Once you have installedSharePoint Server, you can create Web pages for your site and also put up documents for sharing. To add a dashboard to a webpage, you can use the Dashboard Page Template that is provided in the Report Center. A dashboard can be created by anyone having appropriate permissions. Once you have logged into the server, you can have access to the Report Center from the top-panel navigation bar.

The Reports page shows the attached Excel spreadsheet in the Demo Dashboard page of the main users website

Here click on the Reports tab that opens up the
Reports Center page. To add a dashboard that will be having an Excel snapshot for displaying you have to click on the drop-down menu of Site Actions button and from the list select the Create Dashboard option. On the New Dashboard page fill up the form by providing the file name. This file name will be used as a pointing address to the webpage.

Select the suitable dashboard layout depending on how many worksheets you intend to display on that particular webpage. The webpage containing the dashboard gets created. The place where Excel worksheet has to be displayed, we get an option of importing the worksheet and this pane is named as Excel Web Access. By clicking on the hyperlink 'Click to open the tool pane', the webpage is converted into the edit interface where you can redesign the layout and also select the worksheet that you intend to display on the dashboard.

From the properties pane of Excel Web Access pane, you can select the Excel workbook from the Reports Library and also set the rows and columns that would be displayed on the dashboard. Once done with the process, you can Check-In the document to save the changes and also use the Publish button to see the dashboard of the webpage.

Onto a dashboard, along with Excel workbook an author can also display the KPIs for measuring the organization's goal progress.

DUET: A Collaborative Effort between Microsoft and SAP

One live example of integration of on office suite with business applications is DUET. The solution was launched this year and since then, it has been deployed in many enterprises. A few scenarios that are possible with DUET include: 1. Time Management: Use MS Office Outlook calendar to report time in SAP Software. 2. Budget Monitoring: Helps managers receive SAP reports in their Outlook inbox and gives them the flexibility to work on them offline. 3. Organizational Management and leave management: Several possibilities are there in these two features, like report distribution, alerts and notification, Form-based process, offline capabilities, Real time contextual Intelligence, etc. A few months ago, DUET also included support for a CRM package and was also integrated with Microsoft Communication Server 2007. The integration with the latter will allow integration of SAP business processes with Communication Server's 'click-to-communicate' features for instant messaging, VOIP-enabled phone calls, video conferencing etc. DUET promises to bring plenty of key organization benefits like reduced complexities of everyday tasks, information can be acted upon in realtime without the need of toggling between two different applications or tools. Users can work with familiar application so they don't need to be trained on how to use SAP applications. This in turn helps improve collaboration and decision making as all updated information is available in realtime to decision makers. With Duet, an employee's HR records can be directly accessed from MS Outlook, like joining details, leaves taken, assignments, etc Implementation of DUET is probably the only critical part, as it is complex and needs expertise. But once implemented it surely will bring the much-needed relief for the users. Ideally a DUET server can support up to 1000 users. Once certain prerequisite for the configuration have been taken care of, it should be ready to roll. There are lots of developments happening to add more functionality into DUET and in the coming years more applications will be added.

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