Business-application software developer Infor on Thursday released Infor Workspace, a Microsoft SharePoint-based user interface that ties together corporate applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence (BI), and collaboration.

Infor Workspace is available for Infor ERP LN for manufacturing; Infor ERP SyteLine for Microsoft .NET environments; Infor EAM, a Web-architected asset-management program; Infor FMS SunSystems for financial management; and Infor Expense Management for expense accounts. The developer plans to make it the standard interface when it unveils future browser-based applications over time, Infor said in a statement.

Developers are steadily integrating with SharePoint: In February, for example, Telligent released a beta of its social-collaboration software that integrated with SharePoint 2010. Last October, Yammer announced its integration with SharePoint 2010 .

Businesses are looking to fully leverage their investment in ERP software, a market expected to become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013, according to Forrester.

By leveraging Microsoft's SharePoint and BI expertise, Infor now enables corporate end-users to encounter a common look-and-feel, reducing training, and enhancing ease-of-use, no matter which Infor Workforce software they use, according to Infor. The user interface includes single sign-on and seamless navigation, whether an organization has deployed the application on-premise or in the cloud, Infor said. Infor Workspace, which delivers real-time contextual BI, also allows applications to bring in external data such as key performance indicators, dynamic alerts, mapping tools, and currency and time conversion.

"Sifting through multiple applications for data greatly hindered the ability of our staff to work on what matters," Dale Brittan, CIO of Brewster Dairy, an Infor customer, said in a statement. "Infor Workspace greatly improves productivity by unifying all relevant information by job function into a single interface and alerting users to take immediate action on any unexpected variations to their standard processes."

"No longer will business and social tools be separate. Infor Workspace seamlessly melds them together, making it as easy to interact with co-workers around the world as it is to use the application itself. We call it socializing the enterprise, and believe this kind of new user experience will not only result in dramatically improved employee satisfaction, it will also produce clear, measureable improvements in productivity, performance and return on investment," said Soma Somasundaram, senior vice president, Global Product Development at Infor in a release.

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