Putting Beautiful Faces on Big Back-Ends

SharePoint is well on its way to becoming the One Front Door through which employees, customers, learners, and partners engage with the organization. That’s why there’s been a great deal of interest, from both IT and the business, in integrating line-of-business systems like PeopleSoft, Blackboard, and JD Edwards into SharePoint.

We spend all day, everyday, talking to parties from both  sides of the  equation. Different people in different roles integrate line-of-business systems into SharePoint for different reasons. We talk to CIO’s, HR and Financial System Managers and SharePoint architects everyday.

Chief Information Officers

If you’re the CIO of an organization that has invested heavily in ERP but is evaluating SharePoint as a suitable enterprise-wide intranet portal platform; then you need to know that you can fully integrate your line-of-business systems into your portal. You can.

In addition, with InFlight you can completely avoid the cost and uncertainty associated with developing point-to-point integrations. When considering build vs. buy you should know that InFlight will take less time to implement, no time to maintain and offer better performance than any other integration product or technique.

HR and Financial System Managers

Human Resources and Financial Systems Managers and LOB owners want to know if they can integrate Manager Self Service and Employee Self Service into SharePoint. They can. InFlight enables you to extend self-service functionality like ‘view paycheck’, ‘timesheets’, ‘expense reports’, ‘personal information summary’ and more into SharePoint. In fact, with InFlight if you can see it in PeopleSoft, JD Edwards or Blackboard you can surface in SharePoint.

SharePoint and Portal Architects:

SharePoint architects are frequently asked to identify and validate reliable tools for integrating PeopleSoft, JD Edwards or Blackboard into SharePoint. As a custom SharePoint web part, InFlight is easy to use. Once installed and configured you can integrate your line-of-business systems into SharePoint in minutes. InFlight is a standards-based product integration. InFlight™ is classified as both an Oracle Validated Integration and a Microsoft Silver ISV solution.

What to Integrate First?

Not everybody has a clear idea of exactly what they want to integrate into SharePoint first. Sometimes its student self service for course scheduling and enrollment, other times its PeopleSoft Employee Self-Service. Take a look at our Top 10 List of Integrations if you’re not sure. Before you start you should know that the InFlight rule of thumb says that if you can see it in PeopleSoft, Blackboard or JD Edwards, you can surface it in SharePoint.

While InFlight can integrate just about anything into SharePoint, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards manager and employee self-service components are frequently the first to go. If you’re running Blackboard learn you might select courses, to-do’s or performance reports.

Either way, the following is a top 10 list just to get you thinking.

• My Courses and My Grades
• My Tasks and To-Do’s
• Course Evaluations and Grade Center
• Course Enrollment
• Course and Learner Performance Reports
• Personal Information Summary
• Time and Expense Entry
• View Paycheck
• Paid Time Off
• Candidate Gateway and Recruiting

Why Integrate Line-of-Business Systems and SharePoint?

We think the reasons are obvious, but people still ask. Simply put, there are lots of reasons to integrate your back-end systems with SharePoint, but there are several recurring themes. Most organizations want to:

1. Deliver an improved user experience
2. Make their enterprise systems mobile quickly and easily
3. Eliminate the need to log in to multiple systems
4. Streamline core processes
5. Provide a single portal where users go to interact with the company
6. Pair functionality in your line-of-business systems with supporting documentation in SharePoint

How We Integrate LOB Systems and SharePoint

InFlight allows you to surface PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Blackboard components into SharePoint one at a time. You can shape, skin and modify their appearance. You can go after the data, or make it read/write and InFlight offers full single-sign-on. Unless you want them to, users won’t even know they’re accessing a system outside of SharePoint.

InFlight is a farm solution and runs as a custom SharePoint web part and a server component directly on the SharePoint server. InFlight sits between your LOB System and SharePoint, filtering the conversation between the two, on the fly. InFlight was designed to be ‘hands off’ ERP and uses existing HTML rendering channels. Therefore no changes to your IT infrastructure are necessary.

InFlight provides your organization with an integration capability that you can  deploy quickly and turn on a dime. No web services development, no code. Period. That makes InFlight an ideal Phase I Integration.

InFlight offers a fast and easy way for you to integrate LOB systems and functionality into SharePoint. A Phase I set of InFlight integrations might include some of the most common PeopleSoft, Blackboard or JD Edwards self-service components. Integrating even just a handful of components will increase the stickiness of your enterprise SharePoint portal. Portals that are sticky get used more often and are much more likely to gain the traction they need in order to be successful.

Clients who have chosen to deploy InFlight as part of Phase I of their portal launch have saved a tremendous amount of time and money. InFlight lets customers avoid messy web services integration which means more time can be spent focusing limited resources on what really matters; delivering an amazing user experience.

Perhaps your Phase I go-live just needs single sign-on or a small handful of integrations. On the other hand, perhaps you want to add a complete HR self service capability to your portal or you  have literally dozens of desired integrations in mind. Either way, we can help you meet your goals faster, easier and cheaper than any other product or solution on the market today. We can even enable you to make Blackboard, JD Edwards or PeopleSoft mobile.