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

Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with

SharePoint 2010

White Paper

October 2011

Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 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, e-mail addresses, logos, people, places, and events

depicted in examples herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, e-mail

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.

© 2011 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 | 3

Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 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 2010 .................................................................................................... 6

Business Connectivity Services ................................................................................................................................................... 6

Implement, Extend, and Improve Business Processes by Building Solutions on

SharePoint 2010............................................................................................................................................. 7

Business Solutions in SharePoint 2010 ................................................................................................................................... 7

IT-Managed Solutions ................................................................................................................................................................ 7

Advanced User and Information Worker Solutions ......................................................................................................... 8

Increase Productivity with Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence ................................. 10

Use the SharePoint Platform to Speed ROI and Decrease Business Risk ............................... 11

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 12

Resources ....................................................................................................................................................... 13

Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 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 2010.

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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 emails 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 | 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 | 11

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

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 time-

consuming 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.

Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010 | White Paper Page | 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 2010. 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 | 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)