Greetings!!  My name is Srikanth Ranganathan, and I am a Lead Program Manager for Duet. Starting today, I am joining several other members of the Microsoft Duet team in sharing information about Duet. Initially, I will be writing about what's coming in Duet 1.5, planned to be released later this year. The Duet product development team is very excited about the product we are building, and I am looking forward to being able to talk about all the great work the team has been doing publicly. As things unfold, I look forward to your feedback on what you would like to read about. 

With that said, let's finish this initial post with some discussion of a feature that has made customers ask for more. Offline access...

Improving Information Worker productivity is the nucleus, DNA, mantra of Duet. If there is one feature that is so fundamental to IW productivity it's the Offline access to LOB data. IW's are aware of the productivity gains due to Offline access features of Outlook. Duet extends these productivity gains to accessing LOB data as well. Customers who experience Offline access to LOB data in Duet become so excited that they want to see more of it.

While Offline access is very useful, it needs careful design to ensure integrity, confidentiality and security are not compromised. Offline access is achieved via a concept of synchronization between Outlook and the backend LOB system. We have significantly improved synchronization in Duet 1.5.

Duet 1.5 will see improved performance, improved error handling and improved diagnostics. We will expand on this capability in our subsequent releases as well. We will discuss this is in more detail in subsequent articles in this blog.This is an exciting feature for us for it applies to a broad range of scenarios resulting in increased productivity to the IWs.