Introduction

G’day Topaz Blog Readers and Contributors,

It has been a bit of a spell since our last blog posting, so I am going to make up for it hopefully in the next couple of weeks. For those who don’t know me, my name is Jim O’Farrell and my role here at Topaz Bridge is Director, Product Marketing. My background is in product, marketing and business development in the enterprise software application space. My interests are in how people use software to improve their productivity and how this productivity impacts an organization.

That said, I will be writing about some of the myths (I have four general myths) relating to SharePoint/SAP HCM Self Service solutions. Over the next few weeks (every Monday - let’s call them “Myth Mondays”) I will publish and hopefully, you will respond to and we will have a lively discussion about this new world of unified portal content - e.g. the merging of structured and unstructured data. And together our goal will be to “bust a few myths” about SharePoint/SAP interoperability.

So, MythBusters… let me do an introduction and I’ll see you next Monday with the first of our myths…

SAP® Human Capital Management (HCM) and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® 2007 are industry standard enterprise software solutions that have been deployed in a broad range of companies worldwide. SharePoint, even given a relatively late start in the enterprise software market, is quickly becoming the de-facto industry standard for portal and collaborative solutions, especially for managing unstructured data (documents, images, etc.). SAP’s HCM application is the HR backbone for thousands of companies worldwide and a logical foundation for applications requiring employee data. As the requirement and benefit of managing and presenting unstructured data alongside structured information and business processes become more apparent, many companies are considering how to integrate information that resides in their line of business applications such as SAP HCM in unstructured, collaborative scenarios hosted in their SharePoint environment. Best of all, integrating these two marking leading solutions can offer a quick payback, making it an ideal project for today’s tighter budgets.

Unfortunately, few companies have managed to successfully integrate SAP HCM and SharePoint and experienced resources can be hard to come by. As a result, there are several prevalent myths in the marketplace which can derail self-service projects before they even begin. In this document, we address four of the most common myths and offer suggestions for properly dealing with them.

Next Monday, we will explore

Myth #1 “Don’t Invest in HR systems during economic downturns…”