Microsoft 'Snap-Ins' to Smooth Integration from Desktop to ERP

Published: February 22, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft introduced new software Monday aimed at making it easier for users to access data and business processes contained in the company's back-office ERP and CRM applications from front-office productivity programs like Word, Outlook, and Excel. The new software, called Microsoft Dynamics Snap, is designed to eliminate the need for users to learn new programs, and also cut down on the cutting and pasting of data into Office programs from Microsoft's Dynamics applications, including Axapta and CRM.

With a monopoly on the desktop, Microsoft enjoys tremendous advantages when it comes to designing and writing front-end to back-office applications, a multi-billion-dollar industry where Microsoft has made great strides toward becoming a competitor to the ERP giants like SAP, Oracle, SSA Global, the future Infor-Geac combination, and the future Lawson-Intentia combination--at least in mindshare if not in actual market-share yet.

While there are a number of utilities designed to integrate Office apps with ERP systems, such as Turbo-Gorilla's iSeries PC-Engine and Global Software's Spreadsheet Server, which is popular with users of OS/400-based ERP systems, there are still integration hurdles users must overcome, and license agreements to be signed and paid for. Because it owns the Office apps that people want to use to access ERP systems, Microsoft can provide a highly tailored approach to integrating these two worlds, and it can provide this capability as another benefit of choosing Microsoft as an IT supplier.

We got our first glimpse into the future of Office as a front-end for ERP systems less than a year ago when Microsoft and its strategic partner SAP announced "Mendocino," (see "Microsoft Office to Become Interface for SAP's ERP Software"). While that project is still in the development stage, Microsoft has moved forward with its own plans to turn Office into the front-end for its Dynamics suite of ERP and CRM products through its Dynamics Snap program.

Currently, only two Dynamics applications, Dynamics AX 3.0 (formerly Axapta) and Dynamics CRM 3.0, are supported with Snap. The four Snap programs that are currently available include the Timesheet Management Snap-In and Vacation Management Snap-In, which support AX 3.0, and two flavors of a Business Data Lookup Snap-In, one for CRM 3.0 and the other for AX 3.0.

Locating and transferring business data into Office from Microsoft's ERP and CRM software is a simple matter of opening a task pane, says Satya Nadella, vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions group.

"Most people want to be able to do this without opening multiple programs, cutting and pasting data, or having to master the full complexity of all of the software in a company just because they want to be able to, for example, accurately allocate the amount of their time they spend working on a specific project," Nadella says in a Q&A posted to Microsoft's Web site . "At a grand level, we describe this as bridging the worlds of business productivity and personal productivity, but at a personal level it comes down to the simple fact that we want to build software that works the way people really work."

For example, dealing with timesheet and vacation time issues will be much easier as a result of the Timesheet Management Snap-In and the Vacation Management Snap-Ins, Nadella says. Employees in service industries that are required to track how they allocate their time across multiple projects will benefit greatly from the Timesheet plug-in, while the Vacation Time plug-in will let both employees and managers use Outlook to handle the process of requesting and approving time off.

Similarly, the process of sending customers and partners order status e-mails should be much simpler as a result of the new Business Data Look-Up plug-ins for both AX and CRM. Users will be able to look up and copy data from AX and CRM, without getting a license to these products, and without becoming a reporting wiz and learning how to navigate the relational data store via SQL.

Microsoft is giving away its Snap-Ins free of charge through its www.gotdotnet.com Web site, an online community for .NET developers. Currently, just those four Snap-Ins are available, but Microsoft has a long list of ideas for new Snap-Ins, and plan to release more through the rest of the year, Nadella says. The company is also working on similar Snap-In plans that will integrate future Dynamics apps with 2007 Microsoft Office System, the new name Microsoft gave to the upcoming version of Office.