A Duet for Customers, Stakeholders, Marketing and Developers from two disparate product vendors
Talk about integrating the SAP and SharePoint platform, there was always an excitement within the customers, Stakeholders, Marketing, developers and business users. The expectation was always to have an application which can bring the best of two worlds, the business process and data from SAP and collaboration from SharePoint. The Idea itself was exciting that everyone wished to build such application, but to integrate SAP with SharePoint; two different disparate products managed and developed by two different vendors was always difficult before both these vendors came together and started singing the Duet. There are issues everyone knows what we are going to do about interoperability, which Technology we will use to integrate security. SharePoint and SAP systems have different user identities and credentials in place, what mechanism we will use to logon to multiple systems with signing in each time, how we will map SAP applications credentials to SharePoint credentials. Should we look for another product in the market, do we have a product which can create a seamless experience?
Both Microsoft and SAP has its own IT landscapes and they are heterogeneous and distributed. We need our solutions to be high available and scalable. It should support heterogeneous system landscapes otherwise we will have a solution which may not meet the scalability requirements. How to provide a solution which needs to work regardless of upgrades
Let's me put some thoughts and try to understand what is the impact of his concerns on his various stakeholders
End User Stakeholders: Will the solution be able to meet the right behavior, performance, reliability and usability. What about the security. Do we need an additional project itself to implement the security or should we start looking for a product.
Maintenance Organization Stakeholders: How will we bring data from SAP business functions to SharePoint, What about technology compatibility, Should we write wrappers around the SAP business function. Are we planning to create something which will be very cumbersome to maintain and likely to break every time something changes in SAP
Marketing Stakeholder: Will this solution will be a cost optimized solution. Making this application in Short time where we do not even know how many proofs of concepts we need to do will be feasible.
Development's Organization Management Stakeholder: What will be our approach, do we need more SAP expert or more SharePoint and .NET expert. What about hiring someone who can help us with security and I think we also need people who understands the complexity of both the SAP and SharePoint world to help on interoperability issue, are such people easily available in market
Customer stakeholder: Keeping cost down for this application and implement something which should sustain will be a tough job to handle.
Now let's deal with same situation where we have "Duet Enterprise" a product developed jointly by SAP and Microsoft which has been 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.
Let's look at the Built-in Capability of Duet Enterprise see if it answers the challenges what we have discussed earlier.
The main objective of Duet Enterprise is to provide an interoperability foundation and rapid development approach so that companies can take better advantage of their existing investments in Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office, and SAP software. Duet Enterprise focuses on needed plumbing at every level so that interoperable solutions become very easy to assemble
Duet Enterprise allows various forms of SAP business content to be surfaced and used in SharePoint, both data from SAP applications and metadata describing workflows and security profiles. Changes to the SAP business content, completion of workflow steps, and other events can be transmitted back tothe SAP applications
Duet Enterprise handles scenarios where the SAP environment at a particular company contains many generations of SAP applications, from SAP® R/3®4.6C to SAP ERP 6.0 and beyond it provides a complete framework that supports heterogeneous system landscapes and provides scalability and high availability. Duet Enterprise supports Multiple and distributed SAP systems and various versions of SAP systems. The complete landscape management provides a complete satisfaction and need of our Maintenance Organization Stakeholders.
Duet Enterprise enables Single-Sign-On (SSO) capabilities out of the box and Trust relationship between Microsoft SharePoint and SAP Netweaver. It provides complete management of different user identities in SharePoint and SAP by mapping of SharePoint users and SAP users. This enables us to provide a secure enterprise application to the end users. Duet Enterprise has been built and tested for performance
Duet Enterprise enables supportability by having end-to-end error handling across the SAP and Microsoft environment. The framework will support the cross system supportability through end-to-end tracing provides a more reliable enterprise solution.
Duet Enterprise provides sets of the common SAP Application objects packaged and ready to use by professional and casual developers. This enables an enables rapid solution development and shorter time to deliver the solution.
Let's ask our architect, does he still feel worried about bringing an enterprise solution by bringing the best of two worlds, the content and process from SAP system and collaboration from the SharePoint. Definitely not, he is happy and excited about the building enterprise solution using Duet Enterprise framework which has always thought about but never built or built with limited capability.
Duet Enterprise framework does enables Business users to get 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 without having too much hassle and keeping every stakeholder happy about the solution.
