I just retured from SAP TechEd && d-code Berlin and as you have probably already seen from my colleague poornima.devaraj we had a very successful time.
The SAP & Microsoft interoperability topic attracted a lot of customers and partners and in my Roadmap, SAP Mini Code Jam and Customer Engagement Sessions I had several very good discussions.
The integration of SAP Workflows in Outlook was certainly a highlight (I was busy presenting, but apparently we had over 60 people participating and watching our “Outlook Integration via SAP Gateway for Microsoft Leveraging SAP Fiori” Mini Code Jam session). All of the participants were able to take a Purchase Order Approval workflow, bring it in Outlook and approve it from there.
As a next step we even showed how easy they can get the same Workflow information in Excel – providing the best productive user interface at the right time to the user: be it via SAP Fiori when working on a Mobile Device or in a Browser, in Microsoft Outlook when you are sitting in front of your Desktop and checking emails or when requiring and overview and organizing Workflows in Microsoft Excel. Always following the principle outlined by Björn Görke in his keynote: One Truth (coming from your SAP system)
In the roadmap session we were able to talk not only about this “on-premise” integration into Office 2010 & 2013, but we also talked about the just released Office 365 integration. The ability to enhance now browser based Office Online application with data from SAP leveraging the interoperability functionalities of SAP Gateway for Microsoft: Azure was received extremely well. Also the fact that the very same application that you have built for your Outlook Web Access would also run in your Outlook 2013 is fantastic. No more deployments and roll-out of VSTO based add-ins. All the apps can be assigned to a user and are immediately available on any client the user is logging on. We showed some nice demos where we consumed data in SharePoint Online, Outlook (both on-prem and in the browser), Word and Excel.
You probably know that I very much like to work with customers and partners on the next steps with our product. The Customer Engagement Initiatives that we have running are extremely helpful for us in the product management. So I was extremely happy to also present and talk to participants at SAP TechEd && d-code Berlin about these topics. I hope to see you see (some of you) in our regular calls!
