InfoWeek did a short piece on SAP's Enterprise Search product and how it will offer flexible searches for back-end data. It's all a part of the Information Worker concept SAP introduced with the Duet partnership with Microsoft. I think it's about time we had something like this. Letting business users access back-end data through widgets and other easy-to-use tools is the way to empower the information worker. It's all about making information access simpler.
But that's not all SAP has in store for 2007. Enterprise Search, which the company will also introduce in the first half of the year, looks to me to be one of the more interesting products of 2007. As you know, most search products focus on text. If you're looking for news, reviews, or an esoteric piece of information about an obscure author, Google is the way to go. But what if you want to know the status of a customer shipment, how much inventory is left, who is so-and-so's supervisor, or whether I am authorized to give him or her a raise? These are the kinds of questions Enterprise Search is built to answer.
SAP is also seeding the development community with a toolkit to build what you might call it applets, widgets, or gadgets, ala Microsoft Vista, for SAP. The company is also building its own gadgets that give you an alert box for, say, an RSS reader that tracks business events rather than news or blogs. That way, a sales manager can monitor when a sales rep closes a deal, for example. There are also alerts for corporate KPIs (key performance indicators), as well as alerts for tracking workflow queues, such as notifying a purchasing manager of requisitions waiting for approval.
Sounds like a dashboard, but these applets embody more of a Web 2.0 approach — they’re updated over the Internet, you don’t have to install anything, they’re more dynamic than what you get with a dashboard, and you get to pick the ones you want.
No comments:
Post a Comment