I got a call Thursday morning from Fargo, North Dakota, in the United States. The caller was Satya Nadella, and he is corporate vice-president, Microsoft Business Solutions Group. Nadella, a Hyderabad Public School alumnus who has been with Microsoft since 1992, wanted to talk to me about the Microsoft India Development Centre, which, in the popular imagination, is where the company gets the heavy lifting, that is writing code, done on the cheap. Relatively, that is.
Anyways, Nadella told me on the line from Fargo (it was 11 pm Wednesday there, and freezing cold) that "some heavy lifting is still done at the MIDC, but the guys there have been up to some amazing things".What? Well, for instance, the crew at the MIDC is apparently involved up to its knees in "conceptualising and developing" the Microsoft Dynamics Snap. "The entire product was thought up by the MIDC guys, with some support from Redmond (where Microsoft is based) and Copenhagen and they delivered the product in four months," he said.
Dynamics Snap is a collection of four software programmes that "snap" into Microsoft Office. "Dynamics Snap brings a CRM (Customer Relationship Managment) functionality to Microsoft Office 2003. The first ‘snap’ enhances MS Outlook to allow easy computation of billable hours by knowledge workers, while another ‘snap’, developed for Microsoft Dynamics AX 3.0, makes it easy for employees to submit vacation requests, again using MS Outlook," he says. This triggers an email to the approver, who can view details of the request along with the requestor’s vacation history, and approve or reject the request. The vacation time entry is then automatically updated into the Microsoft Dynamics time and attendance module. "This in turn makes it easy for payroll calculation. It also helps in workers increasing their productivity," says Mr Nadella.
The Business Data Lookup Snap-In, developed for Microsoft Dynamics AX, allows business workers to use the Microsoft Dynamics AX task pane to search and browse Microsoft Dynamics AX data using Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel or Outlook, and to copy selected data into Office 2003 documents or attach the Office documents to Microsoft Dynamics AX records.
One of the many useful scenarios for this includes sending order status emails to customers. Using a CRM task pane, users can copy data into Microsoft Office documents or attach the Microsoft Office documents to CRM records.