SharePoint Portal Server and EAI

While BizTalk is undoubtedly the key to Microsoft's EAI offering, SharePoint Portal Server can be a potent combination with BizTalk or with other integration products. SharePoint is a natural starting point for integration of intranet applications because it is Microsoft's enterprise portal platform. The single sign-on capability is a key feature that makes it simpler for users to get to their applications. Most importantly, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is based on the web services and .NET architecture that are at the core of integrating applications in the Microsoft paradigm.

SharePoint Portal Server presents the user interface through web parts residing in the portal. The portal consumes web services that are hosted on application servers. The web services, in turn , call on EAI layers that map data extracted from line-of-business applications. Figure 11.7 shows the entire process.

Figure 11.7. SharePoint Portal Server Application Integration Platform (Source: David Holladay, "Connecting Enterprise Applications to SharePoint Portal v2," PowerPoint presentation, March 2003.)

You can integrate web parts directly into the server application without the web services and other translation layers shown in Figure 11.7 in between. This approach is called web clipping or screen scraping . For instance, a web part could pass a parameter from a page to a query, which would then extract certain data from a manufacturing database. While effective, this practice can break down when the integration is more complex or when asynchronous connections are required.

Similarly, SharePoint web parts could be used in a point-to-point integration scenario. Indeed, vendors of line-of-business solutions offer web parts to make it easier to connect to their systems from the portal. Like screen scraping, this approach can break down as complexity increases .

The richest form of EAI with SharePoint is to use it in conjunction with an EAI tool such as BizTalk Server so BizTalk manages the orchestration of transactions and other key EAI tasks . In this scenario, SharePoint is focused on the user interface and serving up content to users and not on the ultimate source of that content.

You can integrate SharePoint Portal Server with applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools using off-the-shelf connectors (also called adapters) from third-party software vendors. For instance, Actional (www.actional.com) offers PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel adaptors.

The Actional adapters connect users to APIs or metadata by exposing APIs as proxy web services. The Actional SOAPswitch software generates WSDL, maintains a service directory, and can publish to UDDI servers. When SOAP-based requests are received, they are translated to the native APIs for execution. The adaptors can be synchronous or asynchronous, and they are enabled for single sign-on (SSO).

Other connectors from Actional and other vendors are likely to follow the adoption of SPS 2003. Microsoft is also planning tighter integration with BizTalk Server in the 2004 version of that product.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 ships with a sample application that demonstrates the EAI functionality you can have nearly out of the box. The sample shows how a human resources department can generate an electronic pay stub for its employees as part of a self-service intranet portal. Similarly, a corporate manager might want to create a dashboard of key reports and graphs that she could study on a daily basis. SharePoint can be the vehicle for this dashboard, with the data coming from an ERP system.