Duet of Process and Collaboration
Duet Enterprise a product developed jointly by SAP and Microsoft is designed to help IT serve the business more effectively and enable all employees to consume and extend SAP applications from Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office. Business users benefit from unified and simplified access to the information and actions they need, both from the process world of SAP applications as well as the collaborative work offered by Microsoft SharePoint. Users can interact with information directly from SAP ERP directly from a SharePoint site. Users can create a team workspace from SAP objects such as a customer instance, on the site they can collaborate on resolving customer issues with the relevant information from SAP ERP available directly at their fingertips. View related reports from SAP, relevant SharePoint documents and other contextual information are also available to enable effective team work. The software provides the foundation for technical interoperability between SAP applications and Microsoft SharePoint ensuring that the communication between the systems is seamless, secure, scalable and manageable.
In terms of providing ability to people to writing solutions EAS-SAP has taken a big step forward, in terms of interfacing with SAP and brining to their workflow integration, single sign on that works across the platforms, standard content that can be acted on, that is quite exiting as that is going to create a new set of IT solutions that our business communities can easily leverage. Duet Enterprise has provided the foundations and partners are going to develop upon it. In addition tool and business content enable composition of solutions that blend process oriented and collaborative work.
As a partner, architect and developer, I am really excited to see based on the starter services that have been offered, based on the business content that has been offered, how we can build my own scenarios for businesses and create a foundation to develop and code for some of really high value scenarios. We would want something as simple as for the end users to consume SAP data with SharePoint capability to span the footprint and get it to more users, get the enterprise data to more set of users so that they can consume and do their day to day task as easy as possible.
Duet also provides ready to use capabilities that offer quick time to value and enable people to interact with and collaborate around SAP information, participate in SAP workflows, access reports and explore human resources related data stored in SAP applications. SAP workflows are integrated and available for approval directly through the SharePoint task list. The approves can see related reports, documents and other approvers from the system in order to ensure informed and optimal decision making. Duet enterprise is designed to improve employee productivity in overall business efficiency to expand the value from investments customers have made in SAP and Microsoft and to help rapidly respond to an evolving business needs.
So far, the structured and highly valued content that is maintained so well in SAP is not available to information workers within their familiar unstructured context (creating a document or using a Web portal, for example). This is not the result of a flaw in SAP; rather it results from increasing demands on information workers to provide the connections between the two worlds of structured and unstructured content. For example, experience shows that a typical business process such as creating a customer quote involves SAP for about 15 per cent of the activities, while the remaining 85 per cent of activities, such as collaborating on documents, communicating with subject matter experts, and analyzing information, occur outside of and disconnected from SAP information and processes. In brief, the work of information workers spans across structured and unstructured worlds, but their tools do not.
Challenges so far for integration of structured content and process from SAP to unstructured collaboration have been mainly:
Challenges in Communications - In order to connect a non-SAP front end system to SAP, somebody needs to write code. We must be able to connect and communicate with foreign system, either thorough code or through infrastructure.
Challenges in Identity Management - We must have some way of authenticating users against foreign system. Identity and connection management bring additional complications. First, most customers will need to solve the problem of how to manage a user's multiple accounts and how to pass the proper credentials to the foreign system. Secondly, auditing, connection management and other housekeeping activities need to be handled.
Challenges in Composition - We must be able to assemble together discrete pieces of data (from tables, function calls, etc.) into an entity that is meaningful and useful to business users.
Challenges in Resourcing - Successful interoperability requires skilled developers at all levels to address problems in security, maintenance, deployment, and so on for at least two systems.
Duet enterprise has been able to address these challenges very effectively to empower information workers to with unified and simplified access to data. Together, SharePoint Server is a true business portal platform that provides all the infrastructure needed for implementing coherent business processes in software that integrate with business systems like SAP, in ways that dramatically reduce the pain of the four challenges to integration described above.
As Infosys collaboration framework states "Context is the king". Most organizations continue to look at collaboration as a integration issue. We need to look at it as a possible integration issue in the context of the work being done by the enterprise. Duet has surely tried to start with people/information workers as the focus, has tried to look at their key goals and tried to understand how do they accomplish their goals. Duet has tried to understand who do information workers connect with, how do they connect and what information do they exchange to effectively manage business data.
I am eagerly waiting for the highly anticipated Duet Enterprise Launch Summit to be held on February 1st 2011. Infosys being a Gold partner of Duet Enterprise Launch summit, surely should provide us opportunity to interact with SAP and Microsoft executives and team members. Will SAP and SharePoint integration in Duet Enterprise be a hit? Let us wait and watch.
By Guest Author : Naveen Araveti - Sharepoint Solutions Architect
