Personal productivity and enterprise interfaces starting to merge, says Microsoft
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 5/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
Microsoft has built a client solution that gives users of Microsoft's calendar and e-mail program—i.e., Outlook—access to information found in a Siebel CRM system.
The initial goal of the project, code-named Elixir, was to give Microsoft's sales organization better access to customer data. Long term, the company sees its tools allowing any company to integrate—via Microsoft Office—with other back-end business systems.
Project Elixir uses Office 2003 as a development platform and Outlook 2003 as the access point to the company's CRM database.
The immediate goal for Microsoft is to improve employee productivity and reduce costs. "Project Elixir is an internal Microsoft initiative to derive greater return from our CRM investments by making the data in our back-end systems more accessible to the company's 8,000-member sales force," says a Microsoft spokesperson regarding the project.
According to Bob Mick, an analyst with Dedham, Mass.-based ARC Advisory Group, "This sort of interoperability—especially between Outlook and CRM—is needed, and something to be expected. From the simplest viewpoint, it avoids creating redundant information as basic as names and e-mail addresses. More important, this approach enables higher productivity by putting needed information within one workspace. Of course there are competitive side effects, but sharing information between two complementary applications is natural and should not cause great concern."
According to Microsoft, Elixir code is being deployed to its U.S. enterprise sales force, and the company expects to roll out the solution to regional offices in the following months. Microsoft is not, at present, making any firm commitments regarding commercial availability.
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