Integrating Enterprise Applications with SharePoint

SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003, Microsoft’s product for hosting corporate portals, is most frequently used to publish information for employees and business partners and to index and search both intranet and Internet-based content. SPS can also provide a Web interface to corporate applications and data through its modular “Web Part” architecture. However, to successfully integrate SPS with corporate applications, developers must choose the correct architectural approach and have a deep understanding of the APIs and data schemas of the applications they are attempting to integrate, and they may have to deploy other Microsoft technologies for certain portal architectures.

Why Link Portals to Corporate Applications?

Many corporate applications contain information that could be valuable to a broader audience of users than historically have had access to those applications. These include enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications such as SAP and Peoplesoft, customer relationship management (CRM) applications such as Siebel, and legacy industry-specific mainframe applications, such as banking or reservations applications (typically COBOL-based and built on IMS or CICS).