Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010

Transcription

1 Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper October 2011 Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 1

2 DISCLAIMER The information contained in this document represents the current plans of Microsoft Corporation on the issues presented at the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. Schedules and features contained in this document are subject to change. Unless otherwise noted, the companies, organizations, products, domain names, addresses, logos, people, places, and events depicted in examples herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, address, logo, person, place, or event is intended or should be inferred. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the expressed written permission of Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give any license or rights to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, the Microsoft logo, Access, Excel, Outlook, SharePoint, Visio, and other product names are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 2

3 Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 3

4 Table of Contents Who Should Read This White Paper?... 4 Challenge: Siloed Information and Processes Limit Business Performance and Consume IT Resources... 5 Surface LOB Data in SharePoint Business Connectivity Services... 6 Implement, Extend, and Improve Business Processes by Building Solutions on SharePoint Business Solutions in SharePoint IT-Managed Solutions... 7 Advanced User and Information Worker Solutions... 8 Increase Productivity with Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence Use the SharePoint Platform to Speed ROI and Decrease Business Risk Conclusion Resources Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 4

5 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 is stored 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 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 and enhancing 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 with or has even deployed a 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 user from information workers to power users and professional developers to build solutions based on this business data, solutions that streamline processes and result in better, faster decisions by the organization. Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 5

6 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 a unified 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 in familiar 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. Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 6

7 Address users collaboration needs by extending SharePoint capabilities and the Office user experience 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 across organizational 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, Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 7

8 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 Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 8

9 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 s 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 Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 9

10 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 to the resources at 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 a time-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 organization s 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 user s dashboard in SharePoint 2010 Insights. Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 10

11 Figure 4: Dashboard in SharePoint 2010 Insights Use the SharePoint Platform to Speed ROI and Decrease Business Risk Using 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 themselves all 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 timeconsuming 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 organization s overall risk by increasing the visibility of business-critical data. All employees have the responsibility to make the best decisions possible, based upon the data available to them at any time. If their ability to analyze this data and transform it into useful information is improved, the overall quality of their decisions can be improved as well. - Michael Schiff Founder and Principal Analyst, MAS Strategies Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 11

12 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 and transform 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 organization s 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. Conclusion This 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 you need in SharePoint 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 increase the 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. Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 12

13 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 Edwards o Benefits of migraton to SharePoint 2010 o Total Economic Impact of SharePoint 2010 Additional resources: o Microsoft SharePoint website o Business Connectivity Services overview o Composite applications and composite application development o 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) Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 White Paper Page 13