SAP Enterprise Portals & Microsoft SharePoint

Like many companies, we are reviewing options for platforms on which to build our intranet. For years, we have used Lotus Notes Dominos as our intranet site. Our implementation is very good as a document library, but is limited in the collaboration aspect. It also requires more IT Administration than we would like to dedicate to it.

In 2004, we invested in the mySAP Business Suite which included SAP Enterprise Portals. Some of the business embraced it as we rolled out team rooms, supplier collaboration rooms, and customer collaboration rooms. But when we tried to implement anonymous logon for general users to view document libraries, we ran into security issues. This would not have been a problem if we had not used the same instance for customer and supplier portals (accessible outside our firewall). The problem is that even if we screen access, a supplier or customer, could play around with the url and potentially get into our intranet. I know there are ways to deal with this, but none that would work within our security policy. As the IT Applications team was working on this security issue, SAP announced it's support of Microsoft SharePoint at SAPPHIRE 2007 (SAP's annual trade show). This is good because our user base has been asking about using SharePoint as it had been heavily advertised by Microsoft.

We have installed a development instance of MS SharePoint and now are trying to build a site map. At this point, we like SharePoint's ease-of-use and we like SAP Portals connectivity to other SAP applications. We are using SAP EP to view dashboards from SAP BI and Single Sign-on (SSO) to SAP R/3, BI, APO, and ICH. Now we have the challenge of trying to integrate SharePoint and EP to get the best of both worlds.

I have found documentation at www.microsoft-sap.com that shows how to view SharePoint iViews through the SAP EP framework, but I have not found the opposite. To make use of SharePoint ease of navigation, we plan to offer EP iViews through the SharePoint framework. Documentation on this appears to be a little more difficult to find. But if we are to provide the best of both worlds to our user base, we need to find a way to do that. If any of you have experience with this, I am very interested to hear from you.

My idea is to utilize the SharePoint navigation to offer document libraries, department info pages and team rooms. I would also like to show tabs for dashboards and SSO to our Worldwide Systems launch pad in EP. When the user clicks on either of these tabs, they would be requested to logon to the portal. After they logon, we would like to show them these pages from EP as web parts in SharePoint.

This is the ideal. I will let you know how it goes.

Cheers,
Dan