In May this year, TopForce applied as IT partner together with an end-user organization for participating in the Duet Enterprise Ramp-Up. Rationale for both organizations to participate in this Rapid Deployment Program is to gain in an early stadium insights and practical experience on the potential and added value of Duet Enterprise.
Our mutual application was accepted by the RDP Program in June. As one of the first activities, both organizations each sent 2 to 3 employees for Duet Enterprise training. Actually this was a requisite for RDP participation. The 5-days training addressed both the infra/operations aspects of Duet Enterprise in the SAP and Microsoft landscapes [3 days], and the development approach in the SAP and Microsoft development suites [2 days].
After this first introduction to the Duet Enterprise product, we received access to the software bits and accompanying documentation. The last mostly in draft versions, understandable as the product is still in Ramp-Up.
The mission of TopForce is to deliver the concept of High Performance Workplace for our customers. In essence this means that we aim for ease of use in the daily workspace of the employees, thereby abstracting the nifty details of the total backbone IT landscape. As our background comes from SAP consultancy, at a lot of our customers SAP is [part of] the business back-end. In our HPW vision, one of the means to achieve a pleasant employee workplace is operating the SAP back-end via a SharePoint based front-end (Unlock the value of SAP business processes within a SharePoint based HPW). We defined a conceptual integration architecture for this SAP-backend / MS-frontend interoperability. The architecture is validated via multiple interoperability technologies and products; e.g. WCF to BAPI WebServices, WCF LOB Adapter, Sitrion. Drawback in all was that we still had to develop a lot of the interoperability plumbing ourselves, most noticeable the support for Single Sign-On. Duet Enterprise now promises to be a good (best?) additional alternative for enabling SAP / MS interoperability.
Our partner shares this same goal, but also has a clear additional target. In the recent history several projects have emerged in which SAP / Microsoft integration might be subject for business and IT architectural decision making, and/or in which SAP / Microsoft integration is concrete realized in some aspects. As the role of both SAP as Microsoft server landscapes is gaining importance at this end-user organization, they have the need for consistent design guidance on when and how to achieve SAP / Microsoft interoperability. Duet Enterprise is participated in this context as an important integration technology to consider.
Our RDP project team consists of the following roles / persons:
From the end-user organization
From TopForce as IT partner
From the combined SAP / Microsoft RDP support team
The potential of Duet Enterprise is twofold. On one side it delivers directly usable out-of-the-box functionalities, customizable in some degrees to your situation. Second to that, and this is where it strongly differentiates from the original DUET proposition, it provides a SAP / SharePoint interoperability foundation. Although the first is certainly interesting, our main combined focus for now is evaluating Duet Enterprise for the added value on interoperability plumping aspects. This validation is done by means of a real-life custom-developed application. The following activities are executed by the RDP team:
In this near-end phase of the Ramp-Up program, approaching the General Availability of Duet Enterprise, it is not viable to go into product details. This will be addressed later, after the successful conclusion of our Ramp-Up participation.
Results and findings that I can share now are:
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