See, Share, Do – Extending Access to SAP with Microsoft SharePoint
One way a business can outperform its competition is to increase productivity. In order to do this it must provide its employees with easier applications to use and give customers faster service delivery. Tasked with these objectives IT managers are striving to integrate business systems to enable staff to see more information, share decision making duties and efficiently execute key activities.
Duet Enterprise, a solution jointly developed by Microsoft and SAP, is helping organisations deliver on these aims, by enabling access to SAP business processes and data via Microsoft SharePoint and other Microsoft applications.
The ubiquity of Microsoft software and the familiarity that both business and technical users have with the way the applications operate provide an excellent starting point for organisations to increase access to more specialist back-office solutions, such as SAP.
By leveraging existing technology investments in this way IT heads hope to reduce implementation and maintenance costs, while at the same time provide an easy path to greater application consumption and flexibility.
While SAP has a reputation for rigorous transactional capability, its complexity means users often require specialist training and the software needs dedicated support resources. In the current economic climate, where organisations need to adjust rapidly to changing business circumstances, it is often neither time nor cost-effective to train existing staff or recruit new resources to operate the software.
Leverage existing tools
But what if an organisation could use existing technology tools to deliver the information its staff need on a day-today basis? And in doing so, leverage its existing investment to open up SAP processes to a broader range of users?
Accessing or extending SAP through Microsoft SharePoint achieves this aim. It allows an organisation to access business data and transactions within SAP in order to develop new workflows, processes and even systems that can direct information to new users and be utilised by non-technical staff.
Duet software provides a composite web services layer which acts as a foundation for technical interoperability between SAP applications and Microsoft SharePoint, as well as tools and business content to rapidly compose solutions for those systems. It provides ready-to-use functionality with quick time to value, which can be easily maintained across the whole IT lifecycle.
Improve user productivity
Accessing SAP through SharePoint enables improved user productivity thanks to the use of common Microsoft interfaces and can provide a window into key SAP processes including accounts payable, maintenance, supply chain management and customer relationship management.
Delivering SAP processes via common Microsoft applications helps bring together unstructured business data enabling user collaboration and allows users to interact with SAP without logging into the application. As such it helps overcome a key productivity problem – low employee adoption rates of implemented ERP systems. By providing access into SAP through a familiar office framework, adoption rates and process compliance is improved as staff can use Microsoft forms to interact, initiate and update SAP-based data.
This approach allows organisations to pull data from either SAP or SharePoint and ‘surface’ it in either solution’s user environment. The ability to isolate SAP portlets and Microsoft SharePoint web parts and then recombine them can reduce time to market for the delivery of new business processes.
The ability to display and integrate data from both applications can help create better business collaboration spaces and improve the delivery of account and product information to customer facing staff. Depending on the degree of investment an organisation already has in SharePoint, marrying SAP and SharePoint together may, in many cases, be a more cost effective solution than embarking on an SAP Enterprise Portal implementation.
As one of SAP’s original partners involved in the development of Duet, Oxygen is uniquely placed to provide guidance on SAP / SharePoint user interface strategies. Our business and technical experts can analyse an organisation’s current IT environment and assess existing technology investments in order to determine the best way to integrate and extend SAP workflows into the office environment.
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