What Microsoft Didn't Tell You About SharePoint - Redwood Software

Alana Zayed
Product Manager
Redwood Software, Inc.

Introduction
In our last eBook, What Microsoft Didn’t Tell You About SharePoint, we discussed the advantages
of using Microsoft® SharePoint® for content distribution and how to ensure you are sharing
all corporate information through this convenient portal.
However, if like many organizations, you have
found that SharePoint meets your collaboration and
desktop-generated content needs better than the
needs of your back offi ce-generated output, you may
need to use a report processing engine in conjunction
with your SharePoint solution.
We’ll talk about that, but fi rst let’s meet Dottie.

Dottie’s Story
ACME Global has mandated that SharePoint be used
company-wide as their content portal. Dottie, the IT guru,
is excited that everyone will have an easy way to access
all of their reports right from one convenient interface.
Dottie did some research and found that using a report
processing engine to complement SharePoint gives everyone
access to their reports through a SharePoint web part,
without having to physically store them in SharePoint
or encounter size limitations. Problem solved and Dottie
even got a promotion!
Dottie is working with Finance to get their reports into SharePoint when
she realizes that most of these are thousands of pages and don’t get
generated by a Windows system. Even if Dottie can fi gure out how to
get these reports into SharePoint, based on the Microsoft guidelines,
she is sure that the size of these reports will exceed the recommended
size limit for SharePoint in no time. Now what?

What is SharePoint?
How did Dottie do it?
Let’s start with SharePoint.
Microsoft SharePoint makes it
easier for people to work together.
Your teams can collaborate over the
web to share information, manage documents and publish reports, helping everyone to
make better decisions, faster.
With features like Sites, SharePoint provides a single infrastructure to share documents
with colleagues, manage projects with partners and publish information to customers.
The Content capabilities make managing content easy. Set up compliance
measures with features like document types, retention policies, and automatic
content sorting—letting people work naturally in Microsoft Offi ce.
Robust search functionalities in SharePoint help you cut through the clutter
with a unique combination of relevance, refi nement and social cues to help
people fi nd the information they need to get their jobs done.
It sounds like SharePoint is full-featured and can meet all of your
content management needs, but let’s look a little deeper.

Dottie’s Dilemmas
Microsoft probably didn’t tell you about some possible limitations of your SharePointonly
strategy. We’ll discuss a few of these limitations here.
Content Type: SharePoint content is often limited to desktop-generated information and lacks
a built-in facility for capturing and indexing image fi les or reports from production systems
such as mainframes, iSeries, UNIX, etc.
Content Size: With today’s production reports reaching gigabytes in size, and Microsoft
guidelines advising against a database larger than 100 GB, this puts many organizations
in a tough spot.
Data Extraction: Often, users do not need the entire document, simply a few pieces of relevant
data from each report. With SharePoint, extracting this data is a manual process, opening up the
organization to unnecessary errors.
Since not all document types and sizes can be natively processed and accessed
through SharePoint, the intended company-wide deployment of SharePoint
frequently becomes just a department-wide deployment, often limited to IT,
Development or Engineering organizations.
If SharePoint is going to fulfi ll the vision of creating a single point of entry for all
corporate information—as well as Dottie’s vision of SharePoint as a one-stop shop
for all reports—front offi ce and back offi ce content must be equally accessible. Let’s
level set regarding what we mean by report processing engine.

What is a Report Processing Engine?
In today’s enterprise environment, systems for fi nance, business intelligence, inventory and
CRM support these complex business processes, but they are rarely unifi ed or cohesive.
Getting usable data from these disparate applications is often challenging. With multiple
formats and media, it can be more than confusing for end users.
A report processing engine will take these reports and automatically convert
them to a usable format, organize them, pull out the relevant data and deliver
them to your fi nger tips via a purpose-built SharePoint web part.
As a byproduct, you also end up with a secure repository, a comprehensive
audit trail of all document and user activity, a built-in archive functionality
to roll-off aged content and barrier-free size and storage.
By adding this functionality to your existing environment, a
report processing engine is a low-risk choice for capturing and
distributing information across the enterprise.

Now What?
You have SharePoint, which has been adopted company-wide as your go-to content
management tool, but…
• SharePoint content is typically limited to desktop-generated information.
• SharePoint makes it diffi cult to capture and secure individual pieces
of reports—and automatically extract relevant data for users.
• SharePoint has limited storage and many production reports are quite large.
You’ve added a report processing engine that is storing all
documents—even the big ones—providing enhanced security,
giving you a detailed audit trail, acting as an archive and giving
you unlimited long-term storage…all while delivering the results
to the user community via SharePoint.
You don’t have to ditch SharePoint when you have large reports or need
to give your users access to reports that are not desktop-generated. You
can overcome these barriers by implementing a report processing engine.
These applications complement each other and are best used together.

Summary
In today’s enterprises, the need to effectively manage back office
documents will always be a necessary requirement. The ability to
perform legacy system format conversions, split, index and uniquely
secure large batch reports is a task that is not going away anytime soon.
However, many organizations also wish to provide a single, unifi ed view
of enterprise content and applications to their end user communities and
oftentimes deploy a Microsoft SharePoint environment to do so.
Adding a report processing engine to be used together with SharePoint enhances
SharePoint’s functionality and gives you more fl exibility in the size and types of
reports that your organization can access via one common SharePoint interface.
You really get the best of both worlds!

About the Author
Alana Zayed is a Product Manager at Redwood Software.
Her responsibilities include product management of the
Report2Web application as well as Redwood’s Report
Reconciliation offering. Zayed has spent more than 11 years
in the Report Distribution and Document Management space
in various roles including sales engineering, consulting
and product solutions architecture. She leverages her
extensive experience to drive Redwood’s innovation strategy
for content management solutions.
Zayed holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
from Oakland University in addition to a number of lineof-business
application certifi cations.

About Redwood Software
Redwood Software helps customers compete and win in today’s business environment through best-in-class business and IT automation solutions,
products and services. We help businesses automate what matters most – to improve reliability, speed, effi ciency and compliance.
We are the trusted automation expert to thousands of customers worldwide. We work to drive agility and unparalleled competitive advantage
through specifi c process automation solutions while helping to maximize the value of existing information management and technology investments.
To learn more please contact your local Redwood Software representative or visit us online at www.redwood.com.
Redwood is a registered trademark and Cronacle is a trademark of Redwood Software. SAP, SAP NetWeaver and all other SAP products and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks
of SAP AG in Germany and several other countries. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identifi cation purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
© Redwood Software 2011.
All rights reserved.
www.redwood.com
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