You will see more of these types of solutions; MS Office as the user interface to business applications (like the Mendocino solution with SAP).
Lombardi Software is working to make business process management as easy as checking e-mail.
The company announced March 27 the availability of a new product that integrates the Lombardi TeamWorks BPM platform with the Microsoft Office system.
Lombardi for Microsoft Office 2003 enables users to “participate” in a business process directly from their desktop using Microsoft Office software—Word, Excel, Outlook and InfoPath—according to Phil Gilbert, chief technology officer of Lombardi, in Austin, Texas.
“As companies move more and more to access screens for exception-based processes it turns out it’s really hard for users to constantly go to another portal [for process information],” said Gilbert.
“With Office 2003 we’re providing a J2EE process-based platform, allowing information about those processes to be pushed to users through Outlook and InfoPath.” ….
Read on : eWeek
Mendocino and now Lombardi have the right idea but they are a few years late to the dance since they are following the lead of the award winning ProcessWriter product from Nobilis software. ProcessWriter has thousands of users taking MS office applications developed in Excel,Word, or Outlook and giving them the ability to automate them with the power of a J2EE BPM engine. ProcesssWriter broke this ground back in late 2002 when they won the Best Product Award at Comdex and Product of the Year from Network computing.
James,
I did not know this and will look into ProcessWriter … Look out for a blogpost on this 😉