SharePoint is a collaboration and document management platform from Microsoft tailored for Enterprises and Small Business. It is a powerful document store where organization typically use it as a repository to hold their data files. In this post, we will see how we can connect to SharePoint from SAP Lumira and consume data to build storyboard.
Use Case
Many of the enterprises have Intranet and repository for various department in SharePoint. These hold files like their finance statement, excel files and documents shared to the entire department or to group of people. In this scenario you would need to build storyboard from the files updated there and also share your local files to SharePoint.
The traditional approach is to download the files and build storyboard and upload it back to SharePoint, but any data that changes in the data source will not be reflected and the process has to be repeated.
The below method eliminates the needs and also acts as easy method to retrieve data from SharePoint and might be useful for enterprise which runs on SharePoint as a document repository. It also works with Office 365 SharePoint sites.
Mounting SharePoint as local drive
SharePoint document store can be considered as a folder or placeholder where all the files are being put. It also gives an option to mount a particular directory as local drive to access the files from explorer.
Navigate to the SharePoint site where the document repository exist. You should be seeing the document view with list of document.
Expand Library menu and you would get list of menu options. Select the option Open with Explorer.
Note: The Open with Explorer options works only with Internet Explorer and the SharePoint site should be added to trusted site
The complete documents would be opened in the Windows Explorer. Select the path of the explorer. The path would usually be the site URL followed by the documents path
Navigate to My Computer and Click on Map Network drive. Select a mount point and give the above path in the folder. You would have mounted the drive. Now you can access it from within Explorer.
Note: Most Enterprise have Single Sign On with the SharePoint which lets you mount without your username/password. In places where SSO is not used, you may require to mount using your username/password
Accessing Data from SharePoint from SAP Lumira
You can consume the files that are stored in SharePoint in SAP Lumira. It can be flat files like CSV or even Excel files. Open SAP Lumira and select the Data source.
In the source, navigate to the above path that you had mounted and select the required file. Lumira would be able to read the file.
You can now create your Visualization. Every time the data changes in the SharePoint, you would be able to refresh it and Lumira would update to the latest data.
In the next series of the post, we will see how we can consume SharePoint Lists in SAP Lumira to create awesome storyboard with that.
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