Lawson Smart Office is a user productivity platform based on Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) that provides a personalized user interface enabling users to directly access Lawson M3 and S3 and Microsoft desktop, mobility and collaborative applications and pervasively update data instantly across them. In the context of Lawson's recent announcement, this report analyzes the importance of user design principles and the applicability of WPF as a platform for next-generation business application user interfaces.

Smart Office continues the improvement in user experience (UX) that Lawson unveiled in Smart Client for its M3 product release 7.1, which was featured at Lawson’s CUE User Conference in 2007 and now has been extended also to Lawson’s S3 ERP Suite. Lawson also announced that its ProcessFlow Integrator can now reside within and work in conjunction with Smart Office to make it easier for a company to create electronic workflows and automate processes that follow a prescribed path, unlocking data from where it resides and allowing it to be used within another application.

The continued introduction of richer user interface experiences by business application vendors underscores the need for all types of solution providers to improve their UX’s to meet rapidly evolving competitive requirements and to empower current and new users to leverage the value in their solutions. Lawson's use of the new interface should drive other business application vendors with a high percentage of Microsoft Office users to likewise consider using Microsoft's WPF as a launch pad for their own UX.

• Lawson is the first ERP vendor of note to use WPF technology. Because of this, the company can provide a rich UX that supports virtually limitless business processes using Microsoft applications. Other ERP vendors either support only a limited number of specific and prescriptive business scenarios, or use a combination of products (for example, Microsoft Office Business Applications (OBAs), Visual Studio and proprietary interfaces) to affect similar custom scenarios.
• Lawson is not the first to leverage Microsoft Office to deliver manager and employee self-service (think SAP/Microsoft Duet). However, Lawson has a head start on leveraging WPF and embeds manager and employee self-service functionality more directly in Outlook than Duet (which is more of an add-on launched from Outlook as an integrated pane) and other vendors' current ERP-Microsoft "smart client" solutions. Even Microsoft with its own Dynamics product line has not utilized WPF to the degree that Lawson has.
• WPF provides a visually appealing and intuitive interface, but there are some trade-offs, specifically in memory utilization, the need to be tethered to the network and a greater dependency on Microsoft software.
• While it's quite easy to develop businesses scenarios in Smart Office, users are currently required to construct them and the necessary integrations associated with them. There are no prepackaged integration scenarios or solutions currently available. However, Lawson does plan to deliver unspecified prepackaged "point solutions" for Smart Office during the next 12 months.

For all ERP providers:

• ERP vendors with a substantial population of end users leveraging Microsoft desktop applications should consider WPF before looking at other options for developing user-friendly interfaces because it currently enables a very rich and intuitive UX experience.
• ERP competitors should compare their current UX capabilities against what Lawson has delivered via Smart Office and consider it a strong benchmark for best-of-breed UX capabilities.

For Lawson and its customers:

• Lawson should move to further strengthen Smart Office by delivering prepackaged vertical processing scenarios specific to its target verticals. Combining the Smart Office UX with strong differentiating industry capabilities will be critical in maintaining leadership in this area.
• Lawson S3 users leveraging Lawson Interactive Desktop (LID) or Lawson M3 customers using Smart Client that want more flexibility in personalizing the interface should consider migrating to Smart Office.

The user interface is often cited as a major impediment in small and midsize business (SMB) user adoption of ERP. Lawson developed Smart Office because 98% of its customer base was using a Microsoft Windows client in some fashion and it wanted to support and exploit their current investment and affinity for the interface, as well as differentiate itself in the market. Developed as a Web-based application around the WPF, Smart Office functions as an integration mechanism linking versions of Lawson's M3 and S3 applications with Office applications. With Smart Office, Lawson has brought together Microsoft productivity, mobility and collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Excel, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Groove, with its enterprise applications, business intelligence capabilities and business process automation tools.

Lawson's Smart Office replaces the traditional single-window interface with a new one featuring stringed and miniaturized windows, making it easier for the user to comprehend and complete complex workflows that require multiple tasks. The interface is a customizable work space that sits on top of the normal Windows desktop. It retains the traditional characteristics of Windows and Office but delivers real-time information straight to the desktop with more graphical and visually appealing representation of information. Users and IT departments can deploy modules onto the UX, such as calendars, live information feeds, shared folders, specific project workspaces and collaborative work based on Microsoft's Groove technology. It also offers configurable variables, such as clocks for multiple time zones and scrolling news headlines. The interface brings up in-context data as it becomes relevant to the user — reducing the number of steps required for an action.

In conjunction with Smart Office, Lawson launched ProcessFlow Integrator for M3 customers. ProcessFlow Integrator can reside on the Smart Office interface and provides workflow and "in basket" capabilities for both S3 and M3. Lawson Business Intelligence adds analytics so that Smart Office users can quickly obtain multidimensional views of financial, internal, human resource and customer data as well as event notification that works in conjunction with the ProcessFlow Integrator to ensure user compliance with company procedures. Finally, Lawson Smart Office remembers the applications that have been run, making it easy to return to them later on.

Smart Office is different from Smart Client, introduced at CUE 2007. For M3 customers, Smart Office is the next release of Smart Client. Lawson ProcessFlow Integrator and Lawson Business Intelligence are additional options that are integrated with Smart Office. The software requires the version 7.l release of the M3 application and technology platform, or the version 9.01 release of the S3 application and technology platform.

Gartner clients have indicated that ease of use has become a critical driver of SMB ERP adoption. In the past, the UX associated with business applications has been generally suboptimal, lacking common UX best practices (such as easy data entry, global search, flexible workflow support and consistency between similar applications) and often creating a steep learning curve for users. Fortunately, applications have improved from a UX perspective over the past 24 months as many ERP solution providers have delivered enhanced user interfaces, often closely linked to the Microsoft Office and Outlook environment to provide better accessibility to a broader base of users (see Table 1).

One of the most recent technologies available to accomplish this is Microsoft's WPF. Lawson is the first ERP vendor of note to take advantage of this new technology.

Here we analyze WPF and its strengths and weaknesses, using Lawson's Smart Office as case in point. By illuminating the importance of user interface design and how vendors such as, but not limited to, Lawson are leveraging new capabilities available to them, we are citing the importance of the UX as a key differentiator, especially as it pertains to integrating business applications with Microsoft's Office and Outlook.

As ERP products begin to mature, the quality of the UX as a market differentiator and possible source of competitive advantage becomes more acute. Many UX improvement projects rely only on a software development team's intuition of what might be best for users, rather than what actually enables users to more effectively accomplish tasks and deliver business value.

The challenge for business application developers seeking to improve their UX is to strike a balance between conflicting demands for:

• An increasingly rich UX
• A lightweight runtime "footprint" that avoids operational problems associated with traditional client/server technology
• Preserving compatibility with established developer skills and tools, including server-side frameworks and portals
• Support for enterprise-class attributes such as manageability, security, performance and scalability

and the following key principles:

• Defining relevant metrics that link users' behaviors to business value, cost and risk (for example, cost per active user)
• Designing the system using well-known principles of human factors and computer and human interactions, such as preserving context, limiting abrupt transitions and enabling users to explore navigational paths and easily reverse them
• Striving for technology independence except when the benefits outweigh the constraints (you can use almost any front-end technology to implement some core patterns, including Flash, Dynamic HTML, Java applets and .NET runtimes)
• Embedding instrumentation and analytic tooling that enables you to measure how successful users are in completing high-value tasks and scenarios

Microsoft's WPF provides developers with a programming model for building rich Windows smart client UXs that incorporate UX, media and documents. WPF is included in the Microsoft .NET Framework, so developers can build applications that incorporate other elements of the .NET Framework class library.

The use of WPF enables enterprise application user interface developers to:

• Offer a common way for users to launch applications and receive messages, including business event notification, and maintain context awareness in moving between them.
• Leverage a declarative model for composite applications and service-oriented architecture.
• Provide a well-defined and pluggable way to host new applications and functionality on the UX.
• Deliver a rich, productive UX combining forms, controls, audio, video, on-screen and fixed-format documents, and two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics.
• Run from "one code base," keeping business logic on the server side so it can be shared across different clients. Client code is the same regardless of where the service is located — across application domains, across processes, on the same machine, across machines, and so on.
• Interact with both Java and non-Java business logic tiers.
• Enable the use of both previous clients and the newly developed client against the same server instance by delivering scalable, resolution-independent UX rendering.

Vendors considering WPF should consider the following trade-offs:

• WPF deploys 8 to 10 megabytes of software to the desktop upon installation and requires substantial RAM to drive its rich graphical experience. Developers need to consider memory constraints, and so on, associated with the end-user interface environment.
• As commercial use in large mainstream applications remains at the infant stage, there may be other constraints and limitations that have yet to be illuminated.
• Unless Microsoft Silverlight (Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash) is used with WPF, users are tied to the desktop, which means less reach and portability than if your application is executing in the browser. Silverlight provides a runtime environment for WPF applications written in XAML to run in the browser as well. Lawson currently leverages XAML but not Silverlight.
• WPF is a heavier-weight framework and heavily dependent on Visual Studio 2008 for productivity.
• The draw of the .NET framework over the Java Virtual Machine or thin clients delivered over the Web is deep integration with Microsoft Windows applications (notably Office). But the drawback of that is that it creates an additional level of dependency on Microsoft software.

If over 80% of your business application users spend over 80% of their day in Microsoft Office, then leveraging a UX that mimics that environment and is tightly integrated with it makes sense. Not only does such a UX make the application(s) easier to use, but it often allows more users to take advantage of a system that they once regarded as too intimidating or complex, resulting in greater derived business value attainment from the investment.

While there are similarities between Lawson's Smart Office and Duet, the joint program developed by SAP and Microsoft to access SAP ERP business processes from within Microsoft Office, Smart Office is fundamentally different. SAP delivered Duet with 12 different predefined but configurable and customizable business processes and promises more with Duet version 2.0, due to be released later in 2008. Duet exposes content and processes from SAP's systems in user scenarios that present specific objects to users of Microsoft Office. That said, Duet only offers the 12 predefined but malleable business processes.

What Lawson has done with Smart Office is to provide more pervasive functionality across Lawson and Microsoft Office applications with the possibility of unlimited variations. Nonetheless, while Duet offers prepackaged solutions/scenarios, Lawson Smart Office currently requires users of IT to develop them, albeit using fairly intuitive tools. Gartner believes Lawson should seek over time to balance the flexibility and power of Smart Office with prepackaged, prescriptive industry solutions/scenarios that exploit it and create clear differentiation from a vertical standpoint.

Lawson's rollout of Smart Office also follows on the heels of Epicor's Information Worker and Microsoft Dynamics OBAs. SAP has also recently announced a new interface (Atlantic) to deliver integration between its ERP and IBM's Lotus Notes. This is similar to the Microsoft-SAP Duet announcement. The difference is that, with Atlantic, SAP is working with IBM to expose certain SAP processes and datasets through Lotus Notes, whereas with Duet, SAP is working with Microsoft to expose similar processes through Microsoft Office. Other vendors are taking similar tacks with variations on the theme.

Lawson use of WPF for Smart Office has generated the following initial feedback from Gartner clients:

• Storage and memory requirements have to be considered upfront, depending on the scenario one is looking to enable. In certain situations, they can be significant.
• Despite what we would call the richest UX environment we've seen, it does not currently support untethered use. Therefore, it won't be applicable in some field environments.
• Asynchronously accessing server-side data is not difficult, and the client remains responsive throughout.
• WPF makes it possible to achieve some pretty stunning visuals.
• The navigation widget enables us to populate an application task bar with frequently used menu options.
• Dashboards can easily be built from Lawson Business Intelligence (LBI) and placed on the UX.
• The Communicator widget provides an easy gateway to instant messaging.
• We like that key performance indicators can be placed on the canvas and displayed in charts, graphs, thermometers or dials.
• Search is available across Lawson applications. By adding a "smart link" to a vendor name or the address field, a Lawson user can launch a search engine query or open up Mapquest directly from an application.
• Capabilities in personalization are rich and include personalized field labels, bookmarks, conditional styling, tab order configuration, personal alerts, and configuration of fields and columns.
• Collaboration and workflow deliver an almost "Visio based" approach to managing business processes.
• If required, Smart Office can maintain a live link between Excel and Lawson applications, so changes made in one are automatically and immediately reflected in the other. You can make mass changes in Excel and automatically upload them to Lawson. In this case, Excel becomes the user interface, while data integrity and security policies continue to be enforced centrally by the back-end application itself.

Gartner believes Smart Office is a very strong step forward for Lawson in seeking to improve the overall UX in a consistent way across both S3 and M3. Being the first major ERP application provider to deliver its UX on Microsoft's WPF, it has arguably taken the lead delivering on synergies and integration between ERP and Microsoft's application environment. However, we expect that Lawson will seek to leverage other Microsoft capabilities in future releases of Smart Office and hopefully begin delivering precanned scenario-based solutions for the target verticals that it serves. For example, Smart Office would benefit from collaboration capabilities that Microsoft offers in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

Lawson Software is headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, and with offices around the world, provides software and service solutions to about 4,000 customers in manufacturing, distribution, maintenance and service industries across 40 countries.

Speaking at the company's CUE 2008 user conference held in Las Vegas in March, CEO Harry Debes detailed a two-pronged product strategy based on its M3 and S3 product lines, with emphasis on product workflow and Smart Office tools, but still with the company's emphasis firmly fixed on niche verticals, such as manufacturing, health, food and drink, banking, and retail. For Lawson's S3 clients, this will be the latest iteration of a stream of UXs it has offered. After years of pushing clients to browser-based front ends, Lawson finally decided it needed to run its front end as a Windows application.

Creating a differentiated UX is a big risk in applications, because you usually have a workforce with varying IT skills. In many if not all cases, particularly with SMBs, you can safely assume that most users are familiar with Outlook and other Microsoft desktop applications, so creating an application with a similar look and feel lessens the learning curve. WPF opens up new doors for use with business applications because, while there are some trade-offs, it provides improved access to enterprise applications and data through familiar desktop tools.

While software developers will have to consider the current constraints and trade-offs before making significant investments and commitments to the technology, Gartner believes Lawson's Smart Office UX is a step ahead of current offerings from leading ERP vendors. In general, the strength of Smart Office (and Microsoft's WPF) from the standpoint of the end-user experience is its overall pervasiveness. With WPF you can deliver a more flexible interface for accessing and manipulating information. Each user also has a lot of control over his/her own user interface. Users can easily change their own screens and layouts (to the extent security allows it). Arguably, Smart Office in conjunction with WPF has raised the bar on just how far a "smart" UX experience can go at this point in time.

Gartner expects Lawson and other business application vendors to evolve their UXs along the path we call the information workplace, a next-generation digital work environment that leverages portal, collaboration, content management, office productivity, unified communications, business intelligence, learning and other technologies to deliver a seamless work experience.