Free Essays, Term Papers, Research Papers at Anti Essays

Executive Summary
Most people in an organization do not take advantage of the tremendous investment in information and codified knowledge that is contained within their line of business (LOB) systems, such as SAP. The lack of integration between their productivity tools and their LOB systems has made it difficult for information workers to reach the data they need.
Microsoft® is committed to empowering information workers with simplified access to key business data and processes through the Microsoft 2007 Office system. This paper describes how organizations can extend the benefits of SAP to information workers through integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
Information workers need separated SAP
SAP customers value and rely on SAP for enterprise resource planning in finance, operations, human resources, and other activities. Most customers also rely on Microsoft productivity tools. The issue is that the structured and highly valued content that is maintained so well in SAP is not available to information workers within their familiar, unstructured context (creating a document or using a Web site, for example). This is not the result of a flaw in SAP; rather, the challenge results from increasing demands on information workers who are required to provide the connections between the two worlds of structured and unstructured content.
For example, experience shows that a typical business process, such as creating a customer quote, involves SAP for about 15 percent of activities. The remaining 85 percent of activities, such as collaborating on documents, communicating with subject matter experts, and analyzing information, occurs outside of and disconnected from SAP information and processes. In brief, the work of information workers spans across structured and unstructured worlds, but their tools do not.
Integration can now be achieved
This problem is well-known. The approaches to integrating...