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MS Connects Office and Back-Office Apps
Robert writes to tell us CBR Online is reporting that Microsoft has released a new set of tools to link up their back-office applications with Office 2003. From the article: "The Microsoft Dynamics Snap tools allow users to interact with data and processes within Dynamics AX 3.0 (Axapta), and Dynamics CRM 3.0 without leaving Office, by taking small components from the back office applications and snapping them into the Office environment. The initial release delivers four applications. Timesheet Snap-In and Vacation Management Snap-In, which are built for Dynamics AX only, and two versions of Business Data Lookup Snap-In, one each for Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM."
That has a firm grip on Office and still does not understand what the hell this post means? I mean I can see some uses for this on Intranets however for the vast majority of users these features are less than worthless.
Microsoft + connected applications = new wave of scripting exploits
Snap is part of Microsoft's long range Dynamics strategy which ultimately aims to unite its business applications through a single code base.
*shivers*
After reading the description was anybody else's response "What the freak does that mean?"
Too bad. That seems to be the general sway of things. Oh wait, this is Microsoft. *Everyone* uses Outlook in their world.
If only i knew what the hell good it is...
To the millions of Linux only users who live and breathe here ?
Did Taco lapse into a "Querty On The Forehead" comma again....
and some passing winhose juggernaut tapped this onto his keyboard..
We used to do that when someone would leave their terminal without
logging off...we'd spam the intranet from their terminal...LOL
"the Business Data _Lock-Up_ Snap-In" - now that would be fitting.
Payola... Even Taco has his price, bro.
Seems like MS is trying hard to create links between their fat client and back office software. Could be looked as enabling client users to viral infect corporate infrastructure with the next generation of shared spreadsheets and access databases. Nice technically but locked into one vendor and takes away opportunity for using different clients. When will we stop accepting vendor lockin?
Bill and Dave are also scheduled for the meeting, but something else comes up and they can't make it.
Because they are important people on the project, the meeting wraps up in 15 minutes instead of the scheduled 1 hour.
So now you have to go through and re-work the numbers so the correct people get billed to the correct project with the correct times.
This sounds like a solution in search of a problem.
Well, MS is true to their traditions at least: why document interfaces when you can just plug snips of code in across the product lines?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Don't forget the link to Back Orifice 2000. :)
You submitted your story in the wrong place. You need to go here. Don't forget to include your credit card or paypal number. I think the going rate for a mainpage story is about $1000.
A mouthful of integration. Some people have literally made careers out of helping people manage Microsoft's complicated combination of software. Microsoft brands every little piece. Then the IT departments of every big corporation spend a rediculous number of hours figuring out what it all means and ways to leverage it. It's exactly what Microsoft wants. I just don't understand why corporations haven't yet figured out they're waisting a LOT of money just thinking about these rediculous things without much payoff.
Developers: We can use your help.
damn that's awesome, I've actually been waiting for some like this for a LONG time.
Snaps to Microsoft!
I really hope they handle this better than the outlook integration used with their own MS CRM tool. Anyone know what they did?
.NET came out on how you could write a web server in C#. They then ran ASP.NET pages through outlook on the local Cassini server. Imagine, all of your sales people, customer service folks and fields reps all having a web server running on their machines. Also, you really had to dig for how this was done - it wasn't something most people would find unless you were developing some type of add-on or trying to integrate CRM into an existing system.
It installed "Cassini" which was a sample project when
read that as "Vatican Management Snap-in"?
The satirists will love this one - especially those that refer to Office as 'Orifice'... ;-)
"MS Connects Office and Back-Orifice Apps".
I think they may have some difficulty complying with the GPL.
But where's the snap in to remind me when it's time to go to the bathroom, or to make every press of my insert button cause Clippy to explode? Now those would be useful!
It's not a snap-in, it's a strap-on, and you know what they're gonna do with it.
Could someone explain to me exactly what the Back Office components are? I've wondered this for a while but never had a really good idea about what the Back Office software was or did. Where you install it. How you use it, etc.
I do security
I kid you not.
Please establish a hypertext link to this message. Spread the word!
its SAP. SAP will be at the loosing end of all of this.
Axapta is a company Microsoft bought, along with Great Plains and Solomon Financials, to compete with the likes of Peoplesoft, Siebel and Oracle (which of course, now owns the other two). This is complicated business ERP (enterprise resource planning) software that involves yearly contracts, dedicated servers, etc.
Basically: Now you can integrate Axapta (or whatever they're calling it now) with Outlook. Considering the amount of setup, care and feeding of Axapta and its ilk, integration with Outlook was probably not on the feature wishlist. Probably somebody at Microsoft got creative with VBA in Outlook and this is the result.
that post is more difficult to understand than quantum physics
Advertising slogan: "Oh, snap!"
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Will there be a Clippy Management Snap-in?
IIRC IBM Lotus already does this.
There is extensive linking between the email system, calendars, databases, Smart Suite, etc.
Maybe this is Microsoft innovating again....
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
I wonder how the licencing is done... CAL for MSSQL Server, CAL for Dymanics...
Yet more tools that allow little groups of idiots and PHB's to think they are programmers and DBAs. It's bad enough where I work they are implementing sharepoint with no direction (they are basically using it as a big, inefficient drive share with no organization whatsoever...luckily for my own team, we continue to use mediawiki).
This type of thing ultimately just leads to chaos and inefficiency. Thanks, Microsoft.
...conscripted into 'conversion expert' and DBA and forced to work with one of the, what, maybe 7 U.S. based consultancies who have ever even heard of Axpata let me say that lumping Axapta in with Oracle and Peoplesoft is a huge mistake. While my experience with the others is quite limited, in the months spent with Axapta we've found it buggy, slow, very poorly documented, and a general resource hog. The consultants we are working with consider Excel a proper conversion tool and the solution to everything is 'document management' which is a mechanism of uncategorically attaching any document to any record.
The layered aspect and the syncronizing, hibernate-like interface to the database is nice but the environment is difficult to work in. X++ tries to be like java only with a bunch of stupids like seperating variable declarations from executable code, not-quite-sql-SQL, non-sensical naming conventions (or lack of), not to mention memory leaks in some of the most important conversion classes. The forms themselves are boring however functional unless you let people 'X-Morph' (don't get me started on stupid names) them themselves... and everyone once in a while a right click will land you in the debugger for God knows why.
Honestly, Axapta is everything I've come to expect from MS. They have a lot of good ideas spoiled by the fact that a) they can't implement them correctly and b) the pain of using them outweighs the benefit.
I used to admin and produce company reports for a Navision installation and did s stint debugging an Axapta application installation last year. While I liked the ease of use of Navision (and axapta) over competing tools, I was a bit shocked at how much was missing on the infrastructure side of things, especially with Navision. Microsoft gave both Axapta and Navision a big GUI makeover when they bought the Navision company a few years back in 2002, but, maybe typically, they ignored things like DB backup and other admin tools. This newest venture sounds very much along the same lines: funky toys but ignoring or paying too little attention to the nuts and bolts which make an application's reputation.
Here in Switzerland (and in Europe in general), Navision is fairly popular, but nowhere else really. I think the company made their name back in the days when Navision still ran on AIX and is basically, as is Axapta, popular because of the Navision solution center philosophy, and the huge amount of ready made modules.
I think someone could make a kllling building up a similar module library on Postgresql using some or other GUI or web front end kits.
I like how you guys take the stance that unless you're the first to do something then you may as well not do it, when so much of OSS is copied from commercial software. LOL
Oh, and Lotus' userbase is a small fraction of that for Office or BackOffice, so who cares about whether Lotus did something first or not? What difference does that make to an Office user?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
MS and WebCT are releasing an "easy publish" feature (webct "powerlink") to publish work and submit it as homework (or presentation i guess) directly from Office. I'm suprised it isn't part of the latest IIS/Windows Server/Office, but then, I don't typically use Windows... so it may be (I know Front Page can do it)
At least it will end the phone calls from those business course students who can't seem to manage "save as..." and choosing web page.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
That has a firm grip on Office and still does not understand what the hell this post means?
I'd say you're probably in the company of a vast majority of Office users (even a good number of "power users" who can turn straw into gold using VBA macros in Excel). This is because Microsoft is re-positioning Office somewhat and it is going to (try to) occupy a role that traditional Office users are quite unfamiliar with. However, if you happen to be a cubicle-serf at a large corporation then you'll "get it" if you look into it a bit more.
Let me expound on things a bit:
Microsoft already dominates in the small-to-medium enterprise market and the personal computer industry as a whole. This means it has great security but ever-more limited growth potential. It has decided to take on new challenges in many areas where it does not yet dominate, and that is in the enterprise-class server and large-enterprise systems market.
To that end, MS has formed a "business solutions" division and gobbled up a few players in that market--the two most notable being Great Plains and Damgaard/Navision, known for their accounting and ERP software respectively. The Great Plains accounting system and Navision Axapta ERP have now been assimilated into Microsoft's CRM 3.0 and AX 3.0 products as part of the MS strategy to take on SAP from "the bottom"--maintaining these products traditional base of medium-sized enterprises and scaling up to meet those who traditionally look at SAP.
Where does Office fit into all of this? Well, Microsoft already has a firm grip on those corporate IT gonads and it is looking to leverage its position in that market to push "end-to-end integration". THAT is what this story is all about. It is a strategy that has helped Exchange Server to succeed despite the fact that it had (at least at the start) a fairly longstanding and very well-deserved reputation for being a steaming pile o' crap: Microsoft managed to put together a half-decent groupware client in Outlook and used the marketing might of its Office division to entrench it on the corporate desktop...and they managed to continually improve it.
Now, the PHB can have a spiffy and snappy client to connect to his exchange server that is conveniently bundled with the spreadsheet and word processor and presentation software that are all so essential in calculating budget cutbacks, issuing memos for his underlings to ignore and create mind-numbing slideshows for pointless meetings. In the meantime, IBM has their quite capable Lotus server, and it is challenged with a client that looks like ass in comparison and is just as stinky to use. Result? Exchange kicks ass on the competition.
Now MS needs a "differentiator" that distracts PHBs from the trance that only an SAP consultant seems to be able to induce so that it can pick up business for its AX/CRM solution. We all know that PHBs like bright shiny things, and the client application is the most easily polished. I've had a bit of experience with Axapta and can tell you it doesn't offer enough of a differentiator from SAP (which is to say...it looks like ass, just like all ERP systems look like ass). Compared to Office, it is large, slow and arcane. Solution? Make Office the client! Office is far from perfect, but it is fast(er), more integrated and nore familiar with the cubicle serfs. I know it would be a popular option in MY office--right now we have to enter our time in a wretched klunky, Java-applet-based web interface. For example, if we had Axapta/CRM and Office and a "software assurance" agreement then we could look forward to filling out a convenient Excel spreadsheet and have it INSTANTLY update the ERP/CRM system! Wunderbar! PHBs will salivate over it.
This is also all part of a long term strategy to try and own "web services". Office is being remade into an intellegent web services client (R) (TM) that hooks into enterprise systems (sepecially Microsoft enterprise systems) via web services, so that you can interact with some "virtua
...if you are the corporate equivalent of the Borg. The funny brand names come from their acquisitions (what the heck Axapta means I don't know...some Danish dude came up with that years before he sold out to Navision...who then sold out to Microsoft). Combine all these kookily-names corporate stepchildren with a team of marketers who are trying to solve the problem of "brand continuity" that almost nobody really cares about and you get the mess that is Microsoft Business Solutions' product line.
It's not all THAT bad...licensing is the worst. There are people who are "licensing specialists" and just deal with licensing. Must be sad to work on a "feature" like product activation that adds absolutely no real value to a system.
MSFT and SAP announced Mendocino last year. Mendocino integrates office with the SAP back office. Huge undertaking and an interesting partnership.
MSFT is trying to solidify their strength on the corporate desktop. SAP is attempting to bring back office functionality to the common corporate user.
Think about requesting time off, no more fill out a time sheet, no more sending an email, no more setting an out of office, etc, etc.
IBM also announced a similar product to Mendocino to enable SAP back office functionality within the Notes environment.
The other intersting component of this is that MSFT release the source code to this, which enables all of us to build better tools into office.
Before you flame, understand MSFT and IBM are trying to protect their desktop. They won't partner with ORCL because the three all sell DB products.
I agree--this is BORING. Was it the title that got it on the front page?
Microsoft-free since March 28, 2004
MS Connects Office and Back-Orifice Apps
?
Am I the only one who parsed the title as:
MS Connects Office and Back-Orifice Apps