Epicor ERP Gets Its Own Office Interface

Published: October 25, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Users of Epicor Software's ERP products will soon be able to access the back-office applications through a Microsoft Office interface, the software companies announced this week. The software is expected to be available in December.

Epicor is a Microsoft business partner that develops Windows-based ERP, CRM, and supply chain management (SCM) software used by companies in the manufacturing, distribution, retail, and hospitality markets. The company, which is headquartered in Irvine, California, has 20,000 customers, and brought in about $290 million in revenue last year.

The company enjoys a close relationship with Microsoft, which was evident with the introduction of the Epicor Information Worker product yesterday. Epicor IW will replace the standard interfaces that customers previously used, and enable them to access Epicor business processes and data from within Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint Portal applications.

Epicor IW will do several things, including letting users synchronize their Office Outlook 2007 contacts, appointments, and tasks right alongside their Epicor items, such as customer information, sales history, inventory levels, and production schedule. Users will also be able to get information from Epicor Task Panes into Excel spreadsheets or Word documents by simply dragging and dropping the info. The new offering will also let users kick off an Epicor transaction (and create an auditable trail with hyperlinks back to original documents) by simply saving their original documents in Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The deal is similar to "Duet," the offering announced by SAP and Microsoft earlier this year that allows SAP users to access their companies' ERP applications and data through Office. Microsoft also updated its high-end Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta) ERP product with the Office interface integration.

Following the debut of the Duet and Dynamics AX Office interfaces, Microsoft unveiled a set of tools it calls the "line of business interoperability," or LOBi, that enables its partners developing ERP, CRM, SCM, business intelligence, and content management systems to do the same.

Epicor and Microsoft jointly announced Epicor IW from Epicor Perspectives 2006, Epicor's annual user conference being held this year in Las Vegas. The new software is scheduled to be available in December across all Epicor product families, including Enterprise, Manufacturing, iScala, and CRS Retail.

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