delivering business-critical solutions with share point 2010 tdm
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Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with
SharePoint 2010
White Paper
October 2011
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DISCLAIMER
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Table of Contents
Who Should Read This White Paper? .................................................................................................... 4Challenge: Siloed Information and Processes Limit Business Performance and
Consume IT Resources ................................................................................................................................ 5Surface LOB Data in SharePoint 2010 .................................................................................................... 6
Business Connectivity Services ................................................................................................................................................... 6Implement, Extend, and Improve Business Processes by Building Solutions on
SharePoint 2010............................................................................................................................................. 7Business Solutions in SharePoint 2010 ................................................................................................................................... 7
IT-Managed Solutions ................................................................................................................................................................ 7Advanced User and Information Worker Solutions ......................................................................................................... 8
Increase Productivity with Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence ................................. 10Use the SharePoint Platform to Speed ROI and Decrease Business Risk ............................... 11Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 12Resources ....................................................................................................................................................... 13
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Who Should Read This White Paper?
Business users at every level of your organization should have access to important data and be
connected to processes that enable them to support operations. However, critical business data often isstored in disparate systems and ad hoc processes block efficiencies. Users call on IT to assist them in
reaching and reconciling this business data, which can divert important IT resources away from strategic
work that positions IT as a business partner, rather than a cost center.
This white paper is intended for Chief Information Officers, Chief Technical Officers, infrastructure
managers and information system managers who want to deliver business-critical solutions while driving
business value and reducing business risk. These solutions can be implemented across the organization
and empower business users to get more value out of line-of-business (LOB) systems, thus extending the
reach of important business data and improving business processes. This can be accomplished by
connecting LOB applications to Microsoft
SharePoint
2010 to organize and facilitate broad access to
previously siloed information.This white paper explains how to:
Increase access to critical backend business data by surfacing it in SharePoint 2010. Enhance the effectiveness of business processes by building on SharePoint 2010 and using its
platform capabilities.
Deliver fast return on investment (ROI) by lowering business risk, decreasing training costs andenhancing compliance.
Challenge: Siloed Information and Processes Limit Business
Performance and Consume IT Resources
Most business-based IT applications are built for and deployed within vertical business functions, such as
product lifecycle management (PLM) for design and engineering, customer relationship management
(CRM) for sales and service, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) for finance and human resources.
Your organization is familiar withor has even deployeda number of these solutions, like PeopleSoft,
JDEdwards, Oracle Financials or SAP. These applications support structured decision making and
processes within the business function; nevertheless, silos exist between the applications and
organizational functions and processes. This environment can make it difficult for business users to drive
collaborative decision making that crosses business units and spans multiple business functions.
Users who need access to the data that resides in these systems make frequent requests to IT to extract
the information and organize it. These requests are compounded by users demands for anywhere,anytime access on a variety of devices, like laptops, smartphones, and tablets. This leaves IT to solve
configuration, security, and compliance concerns, while stretching an already slim IT budget.
These issues become less critical when data is surfaced through a unified platform. SharePoint 2010 can
connect a broad range of users to business data that currently resides in siloed systems and is accessible
only to specialized users and IT professionals. It also can empower every userfrom information workers
to power users and professional developersto build solutions based on this business data, solutions that
streamline processes and result in better, faster decisions by the organization.
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Surface LOB Data in SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 offers a variety of ways for your organization to surface information buried in siloed LOB
systems, so you can quickly begin to improve processes by building solutions that span departmental and
even cross-organizational boundaries. For the purpose of this paper, we will highlight Business
Connectivity Services (BCS), the SharePoint 2010 technology that provides the core line-of-business
connectivity capabilities. However, there are other options for connecting your LOB applications to
SharePoint, including Web Services using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and more.
Business Connectivity Services
Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010 enables connectivity to external data sources, such as
databases and LOB systems (Figure 1). When your LOB systems are connected to SharePoint, users can
interact with business data from within the familiar Microsoft Office and SharePoint user interface, so they
do not need to learn many complex applications to get their jobs done. This also enables IT to use aunified platform across a range of LOB systems to simplify administration and support.
Figure 1: BCS architecture diagram
Specifically, Business Connectivity Services can help your organization:
Bring external data into SharePoint and Office, helping users to read, edit, and write LOB data infamiliar tools such as Microsoft Outlook, Excel, and Word. Example: An organization brings
inventory data from its ERP system into SharePoint to give sales the ability to update the
information in real time based on order changes.
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Address users collaboration needs by extending SharePoint capabilities and the Office userexperience to include business data and processes. Example: A manufacturing plant foreman
searches SharePoint to identify his peers in other plants so that he can reach out and discuss a
machinery issue. Create fast, incremental user-driven solutions like workflows and templates that position IT as a
strategic asset within the organization. Example: The service department leverages a pre-built
workflow for problem resolution that reduces response time and increases customer satisfaction.
Implement, Extend, and Improve Business Processes by Building
Solutions on SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 allows IT to focus on executing high-priority projects that deliver strategic business
advantages, while maintaining a stable infrastructure. This is because SharePoint provides the right
environment for IT to meet business demands by enabling business-critical processes within and acrossorganizational boundaries. In turn, users can become more empowered, translating into increased
efficiencies for IT and improved productivity for your organization.
Certainly, user empowerment is key to keeping your organization agile and productive. You can increase
organizational agility by using the SharePoint platform to help users access, visualize, and consume the
business-critical data currently locked in LOB applications. Plus, IT can maintain control through
centralized management and security tools, such as data storage management, backup, versioning, and
records management.
It is important to remember that to achieve this level of business benefit, your organization must have a
deployment plan that prioritizes business needs. By focusing on business needs, you can help to ensure
that SharePoint 2010 is broadly adopted across the organization, which ultimately means that the right
information can be delivered to the right people at the right time.
Business Solutions in SharePoint 2010
After connecting external systems to SharePoint 2010, you can begin to build solutions to improve the
processes that are crucial to organizational success. SharePoint 2010 offers solution models to help your
organization develop, improve, and extend business processes:
IT-managed solutions Advanced user and information worker solutions
IT-Managed Solutions
When implementing or extending business-critical processes based on business data from operational
systems, IT leads the way more often than not while ensuring that the right methodologies, security
models and governance approach are being applied. Nevertheless, these IT-led project tend to be both
complex and costly, making it hard for organizations to decide to take-on these challenges.
With SharePoint 2010, IT does not need to develop web applications from the ground up. Instead, they
can use platform services to quickly create robust custom solutions. The typical application development
lifecycle is a time-consuming and costly endeavor. Each application needs its own security model,
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workflow engine, repository for storing information, and more. SharePoint provides all of these
capabilities out of the box. By building applications on top of SharePoint, your organization can get
started faster and deliver value to the business more quickly.
The SharePoint partner ecosystem gives organizations access to an extensive range of solutions from
independent software vendors (ISVs) as an alternative to writing custom code, thereby providing
sophisticated solutions in a prebuilt package. In addition to the partner ecosystem, a community of
systems integrators (SIs) can help users to plan and deploy these types of solutions.
Advanced User and Information Worker Solutions
Advanced users have a deeper understanding of the tools and technologies that IT professionals often
use to develop and deploy solutions (for example, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, Microsoft Access
Services, and Microsoft Visio
Services). SharePoint integrates with design tools to give advanced users
greater flexibility in building solutions, while still promoting quality assurance and allowing IT
professionals to maintain control over finished products. Examples of advanced user solutions include
creating a business connection from SharePoint to an LOB system and creating custom workflows to
automate tedious business processes (Figure 2). To support the creation of these types of solutions, IT
needs to identify advanced users and train them on self-service best practices, and establish governance
to define how advanced user solutions are built and deployed.
Figure 2: Example of a workflow for an advanced user solution
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Scenario: Advanced User Solution
Frank Zhang, a customer service representative for an engineer-to-order company, uses a
SharePoint solution for order entry and change management. Business Connectivity Services
provides integration with customer data, product catalogs, engineering specifications, on-hand
stock availability, and pricing and discount information dynamically linked to various LOB sources,
including master data repositories, engineering, and ERP.
Before implementing this process through SharePoint, Frank needed to access and assemble data
from various systems to complete the order placement process. This often required exchanging
multiple emails and Excel workbooks among various departments, such as Engineering,
Manufacturing, and Finance. With simplified and integrated access to all needed data in his
SharePoint-based workplace, Frank now typically can manage order completion on his own, with
fewer errors and delays. When needed, automated workflows take care of the process across
various cross-functional teams, with shared information maintained in a single workspace (such as
through Excel Services), helping to eliminate the need for inefficient ad hoc communications.
Information workers can take advantage of out-of-the-box capabilities in SharePoint 2010 that increase
productivity. For instance, they can leverage workflows and customizable views of their critical business
data created by IT or advanced users. SharePoint 2010 also can create forms automatically based on
templates within SharePoint and other Microsoft Office applications (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Example of a form for an information worker solution
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Further, information workers can create lists and document libraries that allow them to collect
information, collaborate on documents, and share information easily. IT is tasked with publishing
templates for the most common solutions and with teaching users best practices for creating lists and
collecting information. For additional information about the advantages of user-created solutions, refer totheresourcesat the end of this paper.
Scenario: Information Worker Solution
Nina Vietzen, a customer service representative, used Microsoft SharePoint and Word to create
her own solution for tracking customer inquiries and associated documentation. Custom
templates in Word allowed Nina to start with a standard document, while a centralized SharePoint
framework provides document versioning, document metadata, and backup and restore.
Before Nina implemented this process through SharePoint, users had to create new Word
documents for each customer inquiry and store them in a file share without version control. Now,
versioning, metadata and search, and central backups provide Nina and her colleagues with atime-saving solution that keeps documents safe.
Increase Productivity with Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence
SharePoint 2010 includes multiple capabilities with built-in security and manageability that IT can deploy
to help improve business user productivity based on accessing and visualizing the business data. Two of
these key capabilities are Search and Insights.
SharePoint Search enables cross-platform search to help business users consume and manage important
business data. SharePoint 2010 Search provides an interactive, visual search experience. Visual cues help
people find information quickly, while refiners let them drill into the results and discover insights.
Example: An account manager receives a customer request to adjust a custom order. Before responding
to her customer, she must determine whether any of her organizations warehouses have the items in
stock to amend the order. Her ERP system is connected to SharePoint 2010, so she opens up her team
portal, searches for the part, and finds that it is available in two warehouses.
SharePoint 2010 Insights provides interactive dashboards and scorecards that can help people to define
and measure success: key metrics can be matched to specific strategies and then shared, tracked, and
discussed. Users can create meaningful visualizations that convey the right information the first time,
aggregating content from multiple sources and displaying it in a web browser in an understandable and
collaborate environment. Moreover, rich interactivity allows users to analyze up-to-the-minute
information and work with data quickly and easily to identify key opportunities and trends. Figure 4 (next
page) shows a users dashboard in SharePoint 2010 Insights.
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All employees have the
responsibility to make the best
decisions possible, based upon
the dataavailable to them at
any time. If their ability to
analyze this data and transformit into useful information is
improved, the overall quality of
their decisions can be improved
as well.- Michael Schiff
Founder and Principal Analyst, MAS Strategies
Figure 4: Dashboard in SharePoint 2010 Insights
Use the SharePoint Platform to Speed ROI and Decrease Business RiskUsing SharePoint 2010 to surface business data from your LOB systems and build solutions can increase
the ROI of your legacy systems, speed solutions time-to-market, and empower users to help
themselvesall of which frees IT resources to focus on more
strategic initiatives.
Business units can reduce training costs because SharePoint
2010 offers the familiar Microsoft Office experience that
enables people to quickly and easily adopt SharePoint (as
opposed to training users on a variety of more complex LOB
applications).
SharePoint can speed time-to-market of otherwise time-
consuming and resource-intensive solutions to streamline
business-critical processes. In addition, powerful Search and BI
capabilities provide self-service functionality, which boosts
productivity, reduces costs, and increases user satisfaction.
Finally, SharePoint can help to reduce your organizations
overall risk by increasing the visibility of business-critical data.
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The ability to access accurate, real-time business data has a major impact on your organization. In his
2009 white paper, Business Intelligence: A Guide for Midsize Companies, MAS Strategies Founder and
Principal Analyst Michael Schiff said, All employees have the responsibility to make the best decisions
possible, based upon the data available to them at that time. If their ability to analyze this data andtransform it into useful information is improved, the overall quality of their decisions can be improved as
well.
When you surface all relevant data to the people who need it when they need it, you enable them to
make better decisions faster. This can reduce mistakes that result from misinformation and decrease your
organizations business risk.
SharePoint also reduces risk by enhancing security, privacy, and compliance through a flexible
authentication model. This authentication model can help your organization to maximize its SharePoint
2010 deployment while maintaining highly secure control over corporate assets to increase compliance.
ConclusionThis white paper has discussed extending the reach of your business-critical data across departmental and
organizational boundaries to improve business-critical solutions. It also has shown the benefits of
surfacing and visualizing this data in SharePoint 2010:
Surface LOB Data in SharePoint 2010: Identify business-critical data and the users who need it,and extend the reach of your data by connecting SharePoint to your LOB applications. SharePoint
2010 provides many ways to achieve this state, faster and easier than in previous versions and
without complex, expensive custom development.
Implement, Extend, and Improve Business Processes: Find and visualize the information youneed in SharePoint 2010. Take advantage of out-of-the-box platform capabilities like
collaboration, social computing, and content management to enable the right people to access
the right information at the right time. IT can design and administer solutions quickly so that
users can build their own templates and workflows to connect business data to their processes.
Gain Additional Productivity with SharePoint 2010 : SharePoint provides several capabilities,including Search and Insights, that can help organizations to improve workforce productivity and
visualize their business data in real-time. These capabilities have built-in security and
manageability to help ensure safe and easy use.
Speed ROI and Decrease Risk: Connecting SharePoint 2010 to your LOB applications can increasethe ROI of these systems and decrease business risk by surfacing important data across the
organization to users who need it, when they need it. Plus, out-of-the-box capabilities in
SharePoint can speed the time-to-market of previously labor-intensive solutions. SharePoint also
can reduce IT administrator and end user training costs by enabling users to access information
through a familiar interface.
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Resources
Learn more about the SharePoint capabilities outlined in this white paper by visiting the following:
Related whitepapers:o Creating a competitive edge with SharePoint 2010 and JD Edwardso Benefits of migraton to SharePoint 2010o Total Economic Impact of SharePoint 2010
Additional resources:o Microsoft SharePoint websiteo Business Connectivity Services overviewo Composite applicationsandcomposite application developmento SharePoint Partner Finder page(ISVs and SIs by area and vertical who can help to
architect and deploy SharePoint solutions)
o DIRA framework(role-based productivity with SharePoint in discrete manufacturing)
http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/E/0/DE0DBDFE-D652-4F78-9C28-8FFF35B1601A/Creating_a_competitive_edge_with_JD_Edwards_and_SharePoint_2010.pdfhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/D/E/0/DE0DBDFE-D652-4F78-9C28-8FFF35B1601A/Creating_a_competitive_edge_with_JD_Edwards_and_SharePoint_2010.pdfhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/8/3/E/83E0BCC0-6B79-46C8-A424-C1F627B696C5/Benefits_of_Migration_to_the_SharePoint_2010_Collaboration_Platform-An_Enterprise_Perspective.pdfhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/8/3/E/83E0BCC0-6B79-46C8-A424-C1F627B696C5/Benefits_of_Migration_to_the_SharePoint_2010_Collaboration_Platform-An_Enterprise_Perspective.pdfhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/A/6/F/A6F669F2-0EDA-48F1-9316-1448AF17AA1A/TEI%20of%20Implementing%20SharePoint%20Server%202010.pdfhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/A/6/F/A6F669F2-0EDA-48F1-9316-1448AF17AA1A/TEI%20of%20Implementing%20SharePoint%20Server%202010.pdfhttp://www.microsoft.com/sharepointhttp://www.microsoft.com/sharepointhttp://www.microsoft.com/sharepointhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee661740.aspxhttp://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/product/capabilities/composites/Pages/Customize-SharePoint.aspxhttp://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/product/capabilities/composites/Pages/Customize-SharePoint.aspxhttp://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/guide-to-creating-sharepoint-composites-HA102731595.aspxhttp://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/guide-to-creating-sharepoint-composites-HA102731595.aspxhttp://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/partners/Pages/Pinpoint.aspxhttp://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/partners/Pages/Pinpoint.aspxhttp://www.microsoft.com/dirahttp://www.microsoft.com/dirahttp://www.microsoft.com/dirahttp://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/partners/Pages/Pinpoint.aspxhttp://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/guide-to-creating-sharepoint-composites-HA102731595.aspxhttp://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/product/capabilities/composites/Pages/Customize-SharePoint.aspxhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee661740.aspxhttp://www.microsoft.com/sharepointhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/A/6/F/A6F669F2-0EDA-48F1-9316-1448AF17AA1A/TEI%20of%20Implementing%20SharePoint%20Server%202010.pdfhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/8/3/E/83E0BCC0-6B79-46C8-A424-C1F627B696C5/Benefits_of_Migration_to_the_SharePoint_2010_Collaboration_Platform-An_Enterprise_Perspective.pdfhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/D/E/0/DE0DBDFE-D652-4F78-9C28-8FFF35B1601A/Creating_a_competitive_edge_with_JD_Edwards_and_SharePoint_2010.pdf