Connecting Software white paper integrating SharePoint with line of business applications and...

INTEGRATING SHAREPOINT WITH LINE-OF-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS AND

COLLABORATION TOOLS

USING THE CONNECT BRIDGE This whitepaper explains how to address the challenges of integrating SharePoint with Line-of-Business (LOB) applications like MS Dynamics NAV, Oracle’s PeopleSoft, or SAP as well as collaboration applications like MS Exchange or MS Dynamics CRM and many more with the help of the Connect Bridge by Connecting Software, an integration platform that combines the advantages of integration suites with the cost-effectiveness and flexibility of custom code integration solutions. Connecting Software s.r.o. & Co KG HQ + Europe office Handelskai 340 Vienna, 1020, Austria [email protected] +43 (1) 370 72 00

Connecting Software Inc. North America office

7887 E Belleview Ave, # 1100 Denver-Englewood, CO 80111, USA

[email protected] +1 (303) 228-1624

www.connecting-software.com

THE CONNECT BRIDGE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

MANAGEMENT SUMMARY ...................................................................................................................... 3 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 4

INTEGRATION CHALLENGES ................................................................................................................. 4

COMMON SOLUTIONS ......................................................................................................................... 7

INTEGRATION SUITES: ...................................................................................................................... 7

CUSTOM CODE................................................................................................................................. 8

SPECIAL CASE: SHAREPOINT BCS ...................................................................................................... 8

THE CONNECT BRIDGE ........................................................................................................................... 10

WORKING PRINCIPLES........................................................................................................................ 10

SERVER-SERVER INTEGRATION........................................................................................................... 12

CLIENT-SERVER INTEGRATION............................................................................................................ 13

THE CONNECT BRIDGE QUERY ANALYZER........................................................................................... 14

AN INTEGRATION EXAMPLE ............................................................................................................... 15

CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................................... 19

CONTACTS ............................................................................................................................................. 20

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MANAGEMENT SUMMARY

Integrating Line-of-Business applications [like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems] and collaboration tools (like MS SharePoint or MS Exchange) remains the obstacle to true and effective business process optimization, as these are primarily optimized within applications, because interfaces remain costly, risky and difficult to implement.

Two basic approaches are common: expensive, hard-to-learn integration suites and / or risky custom code. Both limit the amount and extent of interfaces between applications. Both can limit the level of process optimization.

Connecting Software has developed the Connect Bridge: an easy to learn, easy to install and easy to use integration tool that combines the advantages of both common approaches to allow true business process integration on-premise, in the cloud or in mixed deployments.

It allows developers/integrators to effectively build interfaces within a day and saves up to 90% of the effort. With license fees starting below USD 1,000, customers can experience the effectiveness without making a strategic investment.



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INTRODUCTION

INTEGRATION CHALLENGES

More applications having to address increasingly complex processes are becoming the norm in today‘s business environment.

ERP, DMS, CRM, Social Media, Internet, Portals, eShops, eSignature, (Mobile) Apps …… etc.

Just like the car industry which started by individually assembling cars in siloed workshops, IT started by individually collecting data in siloed applications.

Just like the car industry, which „grew up“ by switching to increasingly automated assembly lines and streamlining the manufacturing process, IT needs to provide an assembly line for business processes and information.

Just like the car industry, one of the biggest obstacles to achieve this, is how to handle the handover (of data) between one manufacturing step (application) and the next.

The Business Critical SharePoint Partner Program [i.e. a Microsoft-enabled partner program that aims to identify and differentiate solutions / offerings that integrate SharePoint to line-of-business (LOB) systems] has correctly identified that “most business-based IT applications are built for and deployed within vertical business functions such as … PLM for design and engineering, customer relationship management (CRM) for sales and service, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) for finances and human



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resources.” 1 They further go on to identify these silos as one of the biggest obstacles “…to drive collaborative decision making across business units…”.2 And continue by offering SharePoint 2010 as a solution “…to surface information buried in siloed LOB systems”3.

Figure 1- No BPO without System Integration

But the challenge goes far beyond just surfacing information for decision making. Business processes cut across applications and interfaces between these

applications have become one of the biggest obstacles to business process optimization (BPO). See figure 1. Without integrated systems, there is no optimized process. CapGemini, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology & outsourcing based in France, has identified the Integration of Standard and Individual Applications as well as Business-IT-Alignment as two of the three most important IT-Topics for 20124. Microsoft has identified four megatrends for the next decade, most of which will face substantial integration challenges: 1 Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010, page 4 2 Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010, page 4 3 Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010, page 5 4 Studie IT-Trends 2012, Cap Gemini, http://www.at.capgemini.com/insights/publikationen/it-trends-2012/?ftcnt=10110 (In German) Integrating SharePoint with LOB and Collaboration www.connecting-software.com

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Figure 2 - Microsoft BCSP: Megatrends Especially the cloud will require new and innovative ways to integrate data and business processes as it is extremely unlikely that every business will move all applications into the cloud. Hybrid scenarios, where some of the applications are “in the cloud”, while others are on premise, will become common-place. Even if the cloud is adopted whole-heartedly, the integration challenges will remain as, for example, synchronizing data between American, European and Asian “cloud instances” is far from easy.5 Lastly, the modern work environment presents an even more complex challenge: information workers are required to not only use and produce data but also share it, collaborate based on this information and make sure that this information becomes organizational know-how. A whole industry has sprung up around this challenge while MS SharePoint is particularly well suited to address many of the issues of collaboration and knowledge management, in real-life, organizations often fail while trying to implement the first steps of making collaboration work, as synchronizing tasks and appointments between SharePoint and Exchange is already a problem.

5 See CNS Whitepaper: Synchronizing Dynamics CRM Contacts around the World. www.connecting-software.com/whitepapers

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In summary, these four challenges can be identified and are likely to be aggravated by the trends shown above:

1. Presenting data from siloed LOB applications for decision making by integrating LOBs with (for

example) SharePoint 2. Integrating business processes and workflows across applications 3. Integrating Cloud and on-premise solutions 4. Making Collaboration & Knowledge Management work by integrating existing software and data

COMMON SOLUTIONS

Commonly, there are two approaches to solve these data integration challenges:

1. Integration Suites 2. Custom Code

INTEGRATION SUITES: The market is full of data integration products, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Suites, Workflow & Business Process Engines, B2B integration servers and many more.

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These products tend to have the following feature in common:

1. They have a GUI that allows visual design of workflows

2. They offer “code free” design with all its advantages (e.g. for non-developers) and disadvantages (e.g. lack of flexibility)

3. They require substantial (costly) training and regular use to maintain the knowledge how to work with the particular software

4. They utilize proprietary engines and thus become a strategic investment. 5. They offer only a limited amount of “connections” to target systems 6. They cost USD 50,000 up plus consulting costs, even for small integration tasks

7. They often happen to be a one-trick pony (can only integrate application x with application y) CUSTOM CODE For many of the reasons stated above, a lot of companies decide to build their integration based on custom code. Developing your own solutions or working with an outsourcing partner, has a few pros and cons as well:

1. The code is tailor-made for the integration problem at hand

2. It is usually cheaper than integration suites to solve individual integration problems 3. It needs to be updated and maintained by knowledgeable employees/partners 4. It needs to be changed every time one of the connected systems gets changed/updated 5. It only solves one particular integration problem. 6. It requires the developer to know/get to know the various interfaces of the connecting servers

which happen to be substantially different.

SPECIAL CASE: SHAREPOINT BCS The Business Connectivity Services (formerly known as Business Data Catalogue) are a special case: Highly relevant to the SharePoint community, as many solutions that access data from LOB applications that do not use the REST or WebServices interface, use BCS to facilitate the connection. It also happens to be the standard way propagated by Microsoft to access external data. While BCS has improved tremendously with SharePoint 2010 (it can write data now as well as read), it still has a few issues that make it less than ideal to use as the one solution for the challenges mentioned above.


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1. It is a data connectivity tool. No workflows, no synchronizations, no data transformations. You can show the data that is presented by the other system in a list and manipulate it – period.

2. To get BCS to work with your SharePoint requires a lot of knowledge and patience. When issues like Kerberos, Impersonation, Permission Guidelines and many other security and authentication problems get involved, life can get complicated rather quickly.

3. No versioning

4. No write support for BLOBs (Binary Large Objects) 5. No RSS feed support or REST based access 6. Cannot configure alerts or export to Excel 7. No item level permissions or item history 8. No metadata based navigation (search) supported 9. and many many more…

In summary, if you just want to show data of a LOB in a list and have no complex authentication scenario, BCS is an option, otherwise, look elsewhere.


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THE CONNECT BRIDGE

The CONNECT BRIDGE (CB) is an innovative integration platform that bridges the gap between custom code and integration suites making integration affordable and easy.

WORKING PRINCIPLES

The Connect Bridge operates as a Windows Service of roughly 80MBs that connects to target applications like MS SharePoint, MS Exchange, MS Dynamics CRM, Oracle’s PeopleSoft, SAP and many more via standard REST / WebServices/ WebDAV / etc. interfaces. At the same time it allows the developer to use simple SQL CRUD commands like:

SELECT * FROM Customer INSERT INTO Tasks UPDATE Appointment DELETE FROM Email

to facilitate integration. Developers and integrators can build their custom data transformation, data cleansing and workflow logic with any modern computer language that can access an ODBC or JDBC driver, which is used to connect to the Connect Bridge server. They no longer have to spend any time



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getting to know any standard interfaces and can apply the same SQL commands with all connected applications (no matter whether it is SharePoint, Exchange, CRM, NAV or PeopleSoft)6 Developers and integrators become operational within one day and can start focusing on building integration solutions instead of having to deal with custom GUIs or spending weeks trying to understand the various web services and APIs of the systems to which they have to connect. At the same time, there is no need to worry that the SQL statements might damage the underlying data structure of the target server, as the statements are merely used as an easy-to-learn and familiar control language. The Connect Bridge Server translates these into the appropriate REST / WebServices / API commands required by the target application. The Connect Bridge combines the advantages of custom code with the advantages of integration suites by enabling developers / integrators (even with only rudimentary programming skills) to effectively integrate complex products simultaneously. It allows the full flexibility of a custom code solution without the hassles of custom coding interfaces, as these are handled by the Connect Bridge. Any updates to servers (like MS Exchange) will be handled by Connecting Software via Connect Bridge updates7. Implementation times, efforts and costs are reduced by up to 90% as the complex handling of interfaces is done by the Connect Bridge and there is no need to learn custom GUIs. The operating principles are exactly identical on-premise and in the cloud, as any plugin is installed in the Connect Bridge Server and not in the target applications, so cloud installation restrictions do not apply. In general, there are 2 ways of using the Connect Bridge in an integration scenario:

1. SERVER-SERVER Integration 2. CLIENT-SERVER Integration

6 The entity names exposed might be different. So SELECT * FROM Appointment in Exchange is SELECT * FROM Calendar in SharePoint. The MGW Query Analyzer helps identify these differences. 7 This way, for example, MGW supports all Exchange Servers from 2000-2013 – no code changes needed! Integrating SharePoint with LOB and Collaboration www.connecting-software.com

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SERVER-SERVER INTEGRATION

In the server-server integration scenario, the Connect Bridge connects to two or more servers via CNS Connect Bridge Plugins and facilitates data synchronization and workflow based data integration of all entities exposed.

Figure 3 - CNB Server-Server Integration This scenario is used to connect (multiple) target servers with each other (both on-premise and in the cloud) and apply synchronization logic or custom workflows.

Common scenarios include8: Synchronize Contacts between EX, SP, NAV and CRM Synchronize Tasks between EX, SP and CRM Synchronize Appointments between EX, SP and CRM

8 EX – MS Exchange, SP – MS SharePoint, NAV – MS Dynamics NAV, CRM – MS Dynamics CRM

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Apply an integration workflow based on customer status between CRM and NAV

Apply an integration workflow based on applicant status between EX, SP and PeopleSoft

Automatically add Email attachments from an EX mailbox to SP Document Libraries based on business rules

Automatically add Emails in EX to CRM based on business rules. and many more….

Though examples from the Microsoft world are used above, the Connect Bridge’s functionalities are not limited to MS LOB applications only, but very well work from and with Oracle applications, too.

CLIENT-SERVER INTEGRATION

The client-server scenario is the Swiss-army-knife of integration. Even without a plugin, any developer / integrator who has access to the development environment of his / her application can fully access all entities of a target server that has a plugin via the CNB ODBC, JDBC or WebServices drivers.

Figure 4 - CNB Client Server Integration An SAP developer, for example, can use ABAP or JAVA to access Exchange or SharePoint data from SAP (even though there is no SAP CNB plugin yet) and SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE data. As only simple ODBC/JDBC commands are required, integration logic can usually be implemented within a few hours or days. The only limitations are that developer access is needed and that the other target server needs a plugin.



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Common scenarios include: Accessing (Read, Write, Update and Delete) the EX mailbox from within a proprietary

portal system Accessing (Read, Write, Update and Delete) CRM contacts and customers from within an

ERP system Accessing (Read, Write, Update and Delete) SP documents from within a

Document Management System. and many more…

THE CONNECT BRIDGE QUERY ANALYZER

One Tool enabling the developer / integrator to become quickly effective is the Connect Bridge Query Analyzer. Modeled after the SQL Management Studio it allows testing of CNB SQL with all connected target servers, inspect logs and errors and learn about the exposed entities (CNB “Tables”) and properties (CNB “Columns”).

Figure 5 - CNB Query Analyzer



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Any CNB SQL statement that was successfully tested in the Query Analyzer can simply be adopted into the own code by means of copy and paste.

AN INTEGRATION EXAMPLE

Adding contacts from Exchange to a SharePoint Contacts List and keeping them in sync is a common enough scenario. While Connecting Software offers automated synchronization logic, this example shows how to build a simple workflow based scenario with a few lines of code.

The idea here is to insert a contact from Exchange into the SharePoint Contacts List if it meets a certain criteria (in our case here: Jobtitle = “Star”).

Figure 6 - Star Sync

1. First, the developer can test the two SQL statements needed in the CNB Query Analyzer: a. SELECT * FROM Contact gets the necessary information from Exchange b. INSERT INTO Contact puts the necessary information into SharePoint



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Figure 7 - Star Sync Query Analyzer

2. Next, the developer creates a console application (or Windows Service or WPF application, etc.) in our case in Visual Studio for C#9.

3. Add the two CNB ODBC connections to SP & EX in the console app.

4. Use the SELECT statement to fill a Data Table with the appropriate data from Exchange10

9 Please find all code samples in registered user section of the developer’s corner of www.connecting-software.com. Registration is for free. 10 While it would be more efficient to apply the WHERE Jobtitle = ‘Star’ in the SELECT, we elected to import all Contacts in this scenario to be more flexible in the application of the workflow logic – write once… Integrating SharePoint with LOB and Collaboration www.connecting-software.com

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Figure 8 - Star Sync Code Part 1

5. Apply the Workflow logic Jobtile == “Star”

6. Use the INSERT statement to insert the appropriate contacts into Exchange11

7. Close the connections. 11 In real-life an additional UPDATE would be needed as well. Pre-packaged synchronization logic is available to partners and customers.


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Figure 9 - Star Sync Code Part 2 The steps 2 – 4 and 7 can be generalized and do not need to be created from scratch for every new workflow. The developer can concentrate on Steps 1, 5 and 6 after having created the connections for the first time. Total lines of code: 31 Total line of code for workflow: 8 Total effort to implement this integration: 20-40 minutes (the first time around).


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CONCLUSION

Connecting Software’s Connect Bridge overcomes the disadvantages of existing data integration approaches and bridges the gap between costly and complex integration suites and high-maintenance and risky custom code by providing the best of both worlds.

Developers / Integrators become operational within 4-8 hours as the CNB is using the highly popular SQL standard to control integration. They no longer have to bother with the intricacies and complexities of the various interfaces of target applications like MS SharePoint, MS Exchange, Dynamics CRM and many more.

Workflows, data transformation logic and data cleansing can be implemented with minimum effort.

Connecting Software makes sure that the CNB plugins remain up-to-date and compatible with each new iteration of a product (e.g. MS Exchange is supported from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2013).

Connect Bridge Server provides a low-cost, low-risk alternative to expensive and complicated integration solutions because it can be implemented step-by-step. For example, a company can start with Contacts or Appointments synchronization for a fraction of the costs required for even the most basic packages of the common integration suites. At a later point, it is always possible to connect more target applications or entities.

Connecting Software – The Connect Bridge



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CONTACTS

Connecting Software s.r.o. & Co KG HQ + Europe office Handelskai 340 Vienna, 1020, Austria [email protected] +43 (1) 370 72 00

Connecting Software Inc. North America office

7887 E Belleview Ave, # 1100 Denver-Englewood, CO 80111, USA

[email protected] +1 (303) 228-1624




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Connecting Software white paper integrating SharePoint with line of business applications and...

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