Increase Productivity with Sharepoint 2007 Integration
When your business has several departments that are located separately, you may have useful business information that you don't even know exists. Your business may already have the data you need to solve a problem, but you can't see it. You don't know if the answer to your question exists, because the data may be located on a server in some other department or on a computer in another office.
Why Your Business Data is Scattered throughout Different Business Units
Different business units develop their databases and reporting separately because they have different needs. Especially if your business units are spread out in different geographic areas, they could have varied customer requirements, different document storage dictated by varied local government rules, or reporting needs unique to their departmental function.Business rules are dynamic and vary from one geographic area to another. If your departments are widely separated, they may have independent IT departments and budgets, which lead to data being stored on many different data platforms. Your business may have data stored on spreadsheets, on small database applications, or on large enterprise data platforms like SAP or PeopleSoft. These disconnected pipelines of information can lead to 70% of people's time being spent in finding the relevant information they need to solve a business problem or finish a process. These scattered pipelines of data can cause other problems;
- Data is useful only when available in a timely manner. Format conversions and reporting processes can delay the availability of data.
- Business users don't know what data is available. So users must determine if relevant data is available and then locate the needed data.
- In many cases users must make multiple requests to different data sources and then they must manually integrate the results from separate reports.
How All Your Business Data Can be Consolidated Using Sharepoint 2007 Integration
If the scattered data in all your business units can be located, searched and used from one central hub, then business processes become faster and business users become more productive. A central data integration hub, like Sharepoint 2007, enables users to access data residing on many small database applications, on large enterprise data platforms and on scattered file systems.
The Sharepoint 2007 Integration Process
Our consultants start your Sharepoint 2007 integration by determining your data requirements and defining the available data. With thousands of hours of Sharepoint integration experience, Unbounded Solutions consultants and architects will conduct workshops to identify your business data requirements. If much of your data is located in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system, then the source data definition should come together quickly. Defining other data sources may require more effort.
How Sharepoint Integration Makes All Your Business Data Visible in One Place
Your line-of-business data is used by any critical application that you use in running your business, such as accounting, supply chain management, logistics or client resource management. The Sharepoint Business Data Catalog allows us to take data from back end data providers like small database applications or enterprise data platforms and display that line-ofbusiness data in Sharepoint, with minimal coding. The business data catalog views each business application in terms of meta-data that describes business entities, business information and business processes. The meta-data isn't the actual line-of-business data. The business data catalog simply tells us what information about clients or business entities is stored in your business data.
The business data catalog makes it possible to integrate many of your business and reporting systems where they can all be seen from Sharepoint. With a simple Sharepoint hub that connects to your separate business data applications, all of that data can be used in Sharepoint Webparts, Excel, Access, SQL Server or other applications used to create reports. The newly available data can even be configured to display in standard or custom Webparts, KPI (key performance indicators) or business dashboards.
Better Decisions through Business Intelligence
After the Sharepoint 2007 integration makes the scattered business data accessible, then many useful tools, like Business intelligence, become available. Business data users can make better decisions through the use of business intelligence. Business intelligence tools organize historical business information to inform executives and department managers of strategic and tactical trends and opportunities. Business Intelligence can also provide data for dashboards and key performance indicator scorecards. Dashboards and KPI can provide near real-time performance management and business process management.
The Sharepoint 2007 integration also makes possible federated search in which the scattered source data remains in place on varied systems. Business users can still easily access the data, search the data and use the data for business processes through federated search. Unbounded Solutions can use SharePoint 2007 integration to bring all these data sources together to give the business user the complete data picture presented by Business intelligence and federated search. The business users can quickly find and use different kinds of business data from the central Sharepoint interface, without having to learn several different applications.
The Advantages of Sharepoint 2007 Integration
- Consolidate all your data from multiple applications.
- Train users once to access all your data through Sharepoint.
- Create consistent reporting, from any of your data sources
- Search across all your enterprise data sources from one platform.
- See all of your enterprise data, so the whole business picture is visible.
Does your business need help integrating all your business data sources into Sharepoint? Is your Sharepoint integration not going as smoothly or not going as quickly as you need? Unbounded Solutions can solve all these business needs. Our consultants and architects are ready to answer your Sharepoint 2007Integration questions right now.