SAP/Microsoft Interoperability
Portal Solutions
Kristian Kalsing & Alex Xie
Extend Technologies

What We’ll Cover …
• Introduction & Overview
• What is Microsoft SharePoint?
• Enterprise Portal versus SharePoint Server
• Portal Interoperability
• Wrap-up

Introduction
EP and MOSS are two strong portal products with
different strengths and weaknesses. With the growing
proliferation of both portals, organisations are faced
with many questions:
• Which portal to use when?
• How much of each portal?
• Do we really need both?
• How can we integrate the two portals?
• Which will be the portal of portals?

• SharePoint is Microsoft’s fastest growing
server product ever
Introduction • 100 million SharePoint CALs sold
worldwide (as of 30 June this fiscal year)
… Explain the “issue” or topic or motivation for the
• 500 million licensed Office PCs
session...
• SharePoint is deployed in 75% of Fortune
100 companies
Bill Gates
SharePoint Conference
Seattle, 3-6 March 2008

SharePoint Feature Areas
Server-based Excel Docs/tasks/calendars, blogs, wikis, e-
spreadsheets and data mail integration, project management
visualization, Report Center, BI “lite”, Outlook integration,
Web Parts, KPIs/Dashboards offline docs/lists
Business Collaboration
Intelligence
Platform Enterprise Portal
Rich and Web forms template, Site
Services
based front-ends, Business Directory, My
LOB actions, Workspaces, Mgmt, Portal Sites, social
Forms Security, Storage,
pluggable SSO networking,
Topology,
Site Model privacy control
Content
Integrated document Search
management, records Management Enterprise scalability,
management, and Web content contextual relevance, rich
management with policies and people and business data
workflow search

Two Worlds – People and Process
Estimate
custom
design Unstructured
Get specs from Validate specs
customer with Tech Sales
Decide Assemble Approve
Cost out proposed proposed
discount
the solution response response
strategy
Create Create Create Complete Create
Qualified? Closed? Invoice
Lead Oppt’y Quote Sale
Retire
Lead CRM Structured ERP

EP and MOSS – Relative Differences
EP MOSS
Integration Vertical Horizontal
Data Structured Unstructured
Features Transaction-oriented Collaboration-oriented
Designed around Business processes People
Structure Centralised Decentralised
Primary business driver Enabler Productivity
Seamless integration with Back-end system Desktop tools

EP and MOSS – When to use which?

EP and MOSS – How much of each?

EP to MOSS Interoperability
• Front-end integration
 Simple links to launch specific portal pages
 Page embedding: Page Viewer Web Part
 Portlet embedding: IView Web Part
 Portlet syndication: WSRP Web Part
Content syndication: RSS Viewer Web Part
SharePoint SSO

• Custom development
 Custom web parts connecting to SAP web services
• Forms and workflow
 InfoPath Forms submitting to SAP web services
• Business Data Catalog (BDC)
 Business data web parts
 SharePoint lists and document libraries
 Search
 User profile properties
 Custom solutions

MOSS to EP Interoperability
• Front-end integration
 Simple links to launch specific portal pages
 Page embedding: URL IView
 Portlet embedding: URL IView
 Portlet syndication: SharePoint does not produce WSRP
 Content syndication: XML IView
• Custom development
 Consuming SharePoint Web Services with Web Dynpro
 Portal Development Kit (PDK) for .NET
• Document and content management
 Publishing SharePoint content to SAP Portal
 Custom development or third-party products
 Applying NetWeaver KM to SharePoint artefacts
 WebDAV Repository Manager, limited support for WebDAV in SharePoint

Summary
Both Enterprise Portal and SharePoint Server provide a
broad range of capabilities with similar feature areas
There are relative strengths and weaknesses between the
two portal products
Various options are available for integration between
Enterprise Portal and SharePoint Server

3 Key Points to Take Home
A dual portal strategy is a viable approach. It is not
necessarily a question of one or the other
There are proven ways of achieving interoperability
between Enterprise Portal and SharePoint Server and
thereby leverage the best of both worlds
Define your overall portal strategy to get the right mix in
terms of capabilities and technology footprint

THANK YOU!
Kristian Kalsing
kristian_kalsing@extendtec.com.au
http://kalsing.blogspot.com
Alex Xie
alex_xie@extendtec.com.au