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Microsoft, IBM hope integrated presence, IM will spur upgrades
Embedded realtime communication and presence looks to be the next face-off in the long-running software wars between Microsoft and IBM.
Microsoft partisans imagine a day when business users get realtime pings on their Office desktop software whenever their ERP systems detect inventories below a certain level.
Beneath the covers, that simple-looking alert will rely on a confluence of technologies, including Office desktop applications, Microsoft's planned "Maestro" realtime reporting server and a back-end SharePoint Portal/Excel Server combination.
One partner familiar with Microsoft's plans foresees a time when an Excel "server" tied to a SharePoint Portal Server would facilitate embedded analytics.
"You'd set up an Excel model on the desktop, export it to the server, bind...