Office to become front-end option for more app users

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May 13, 2005 (Computerworld) -- Microsoft Corp. has been trying for years to get other software vendors to use its Office suite as the front end for their applications. Now it appears to be making headway.
Supply chain management vendor i2 Technologies Inc. and content management provider Interwoven Inc. last week unveiled integration pacts with Microsoft that will ultimately give users the option of accessing their applications from Office.
The deals with i2 and Interwoven came two weeks after Microsoft and SAP AG disclosed plans to jointly develop software, code-named Mendocino, that will allow Office products such as Outlook, Excel and Word to be used as front ends to SAP's ERP software (see story).
"Getting business applications to use Office as a front end is superimportant to Microsoft. It really locks people into Office," said Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner Inc. It also could push users to upgrade Office more frequently if a third-party application vendor supports only certain versions of the Microsoft software, Silver said.
But the degree to which users will take advantage of the new front-end capabilities is still unclear. John Mallon, director of supply chain management at Phoenix-based On Semiconductor Corp., said at i2's user conference in Phoenix last week that he's looking forward to the day when his company's Excel users can update information in i2 software.
On the other hand, Zeke Duge, CIO at retailer Smart & Final Inc. in Commerce, Calif., said that using Office as the front end for enterprise applications would create too much processing overhead.
"It's like taking an SUV to a sports car rally," he said. "It will carry a lot of stuff, but that is not the idea."
Rick Stuller, CIO at Hawaiian Electric Co. in Honolulu, said the power company already has vendors that provide access to their applications from Excel through connector-type tools. Stuller said he's "open to what our vendors might propose." But he said he fears that further integration might tie vendors to Office for product interoperability, which "could be problematic in terms of product development, security issues, etc."
Microsoft's support for XML in Office 2003 gave other vendors the ability to connect data on the desktop with information in back-end systems, said Dan Leach, a group product manager at Microsoft. The sort of development work that is going on now wouldn't have been possible with Office XP and Office 97, he said.
In addition, Leach said that Microsoft has stepped up its efforts to encourage partners to build their applications to Office 2003. For instance, it held an initial Office System Developer Conference in February.
Dwight Davis, an analyst at Summit Strategies Inc. in Boston, said Microsoft keeps

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