Why Duet when we already have BCS and BizTalk for SAP integration
Duet has arrived and it's a huge relief for any enterprise which is looking into SAP and SharePoint integration. Enterprises were having limited options earlier which were either to look at BizTalk or BCS for integration. I spent some time looking into possible reasons why only Duet based solution will work efficiently
BizTalk has been around for several years as Microsoft's Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) platform. BizTalk achieves this through use of the several default adaptors.And of course there are third party adaptors to satisfy your needs if any of the default adaptors don't seem to be appropriate for your requirement. BizTalk server can communicate with a variety of protocols and thus integrate data from applications running on different platforms.
So in a typical scenario we see that BizTalk server integrates a purchase order system with Inventory system, with accounting system and these systems could be running on different platforms and be using different communication protocols.
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) as we know provides connectors for integrating data from external systems into SharePoint. Using BCS external data can be accessed from SharePoint as though it is native SharePoint data.
So why can we not use BCS in conjunction with BizTalk to integrate SharePoint with SAP systems? Why do we need Duet?
The answer is yes we can use BCS and BizTalk together to integrate SharePoint with SAP. But there are several powerful features that Duet Enterprise offers
· Duet provided interaction relies on user interactions whereas BizTalk provided integration runs on machine-to- machine interaction.
· Duet supports sending data back to SAP applications
· Duet based SharePoint application easily blends information from SAP and unstructured information from SharePoint itself
· Duet Enterprise has a set of ready-to-use capabilities that can be taken advantage of in SharePoint with ease
· Duet Enterprise can make data from SAP be available offline for use in SharePoint
· Duet makes it possible to gather data from different generations of SAP applications into SharePoint
· Duet makes it possible to allow users to execute decision steps from SAP processes inside SharePoint
The above does not mean that Duet will replace BizTalk and BCS in architectures that integrate SharePoint with SAP. In fact a combination of all the three technologies might still be needed. Consider the following SharePoint integration requirement scenario:
· Supply chain activities are managed in SAP applications
· Several non-SAP supplier systems exists and need to be integrated with
· A system is needed to monitor the flow of goods being acquired from an intercompany exchange that uses Rosetta Net protocol
In the above scenario a combination of Duet, BizTalk and BCS can be used to come up with a robust architecture.
Each of the technologies provides overlapping capabilities and using them in the correct spot will save time, effort and money. Duet is an indispensible tool that provides a high level of integration of SharePoint with SAP applications and adds value to an organizations already existing infrastructure.
