In addition to disseminating useful SAP data among knowledge workers (outside of its traditionally limited power-user dispatch list), Duet has been crucial for being a "proof of concept" model illustrating the potential development and adoption of composite applications, especially when the result of a joint collaboration between two software giants and market influencers.
Indeed, Duet is one of the first examples of a tangible SOA-based composite application product. While several tools use SOA conceptually, in ways that are sometimes hard to grasp, this tool is based on consuming services in concrete ways that benefits almost every information worker. Duet showed how SOA can be applied to the user experience through familiar desktop applications, and for some users, it will deliver functionality that supersedes the need to work directly with any line-of-business (functional department) or back-office enterprise applications. By exposing functionality and giving even the most casual users an easier way to update data that normally resides only in the back-office system, Duet embraced the innovative potential of SOA services. It exposes features from underlying ERP systems in new ways that create more value. And these services can be used together, even though they were probably written for a system that was designed before SOA was someone's figment of imagination.
This fulfills one of SAP's short-term goals for ESA (SAP's variant of the SOA blueprint) adoption—to create simple services (software components, if you will) that work on top of legacy applications already used by organizations. In the future, the entire stack which encompasses ERP, CRM, and all other SAP Business Suite solutions will eventually evolve to use business objects as their underlying application. Instead of having a rigid and unwieldy monolithic set of applications, SAP is creating a collection of business objects that can be applied in more flexible ways. By late 2007, there will be more services to choose from than the ones used to support Duet, since ESA follows the SOA format of "model once, run anywhere". Namely, instead of hard-coding multiple solutions that apply to different domains, ESA employs business objects or services that are modeled in a way that allows them to handle different solutions. Duet is just one of many client-side solutions that ESA will enable.
To understand how Duet is in tune with SOA, it is important to become familiar with the new stack defined by SAP ESA, and to understand what a composite application is. Webopedia defines a composite application as an application that consists of more than one type of service delivered from an SOA environment. It can range from functionality to entire applications. Services are generated through "local" application logic that controls how services interact with each other. For more information, see Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, and BPEL.
As a composite application, Duet overlaps with nearly every part of the new SOA stack:
User screens. Duet uses the familiar Microsoft Office desktop interface, which is achieved not by hard-coding the UI, but through backend modeling and deploying it to the client.
Process orchestration. Duet uses a communications hub referred to as the Duet Extensions to route data to and within the ERP system.
Process integration. Using the aforementioned extensions, Duet translates data from Microsoft Office applications such as Excel into a format that is easily understood by existing ERP tools and their respective enterprise services.
Process workflow. All of the usual workflow processes within SAP ERP take place within the context of Microsoft Office's desktop tools.
Distributed data. The ability to cache data for working online or offline also plays an important part in the functionality.
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