There are some functions of enterprise information systems that Web 2.0 and cloud computing services can easily replicate. They are perfectly capable of giving knowledge workers the applications they need to:
- store and share documents
- communicate with each other through e-mail and messages
- collaborate with news, calendars, tasks, photos,blogs and wikis
The fact that these applications are offered either free of charge or cheaply by web 2.0 providers is a threat to vendors of collaborative systems and of document/records management systems. Organisations may find themselves powerless to stop staff migrating away to web provided applications either as teams or as individuals.
However there are other types of enterprise information systems that it will be difficult for Web 2.0 services to replicate, namely:
- systems that exist to hold, crunch and analyse data
- systems used to re-engineer a business process or processes with workflow
- to bring data in from your various databases (your finance database, project management database, customer database etc.) for consultation and use within SharePoint
- to provide your users with an enterprise search facility: allowing them to search across the various databases of your organisation
- to use data imported from other systems to control and populate metadata fields in SharePoint. In effect using your existing databases as controlled vocabularies in SharePoint.
Microsoft's sales pitch for the Business Data Catalogue is that it enables you to surface data from business databases in SharePoint without any coding. Simply describe the information architecture of each of your databases in XML and then let the BDC search over, and use data from them. The best descriptions of how the BDC functions that I have read on the web are by DotNet Dreamer and by Martin Kearn. Martin Kearn describes the BDC as the most powerful feature of MOSS 2007.
The business data catalogue is a masterstroke in Microsoft's tenacious battle to remain top dog in in providing the information management platform to organisations. Microsoft are inviting organisation's to use the BDC to bind their SharePoint implementation in with their core databases and line of business systems, a role which at this point in time none of its web based rivals in the collaborative space could replicate.
The Business Data Catalogue threatens to burst apart the long standing distinction between systems dealing with structured data (databases) and sytems dealing with unstructured data (document management systems and collaborative systems). It will have implications for us information professionals - how many of us have skills and experience that span the two spheres of structured and unstructured data?
The best implementations of SharePoint that I have seen have been the ones that used organisational data creatively within SharePoint.
At the 3rd TFPL SharePoint Conference Stephen Wilder described how The Leprosy Mission International (TLMI) had used the BDC to synchronise SharePoint with their project management database.
- Whenever anyone in TLMI saves a project document to a SharePoint team site they identify which project the document relates to from the list that the BDC draws from the TLMI project management database.
- Other SharePoint metadata fields for the document are populated from information about that project held on the project management database
- Within SharePoint TLMI have built a portal site containing a project directory. The directory lists each project, and links to all the documents saved against that project, in whatever SharePoint team site they were saved in. This in effect creates a virtual project file. Individuals get to work in their local team space, but a corporate view is provided of the work on each project through the project directory.
James Lappin
Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for
Posted by: sharepoint | 01 January 2009 at 19:44