The dance with the systems

A recent SharePoint user study reveals that 88 percent of the 300 respondents use it as an employee portal, 86 percent use it to manage their documents and file storage, and 84 percent use Microsoft's software to handle their business processes.

They use SharePoint for a wide variety of tasks. Whether it's posting editorial text to the news section, maintaining and managing content for campaign planning, or scheduling vacations.

Precisely because the platform has a very wide range of functions, it is also used correspondingly "colorfully" by all company departments such as marketing, IT, sales and adapted to their own activities.

After all, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how user-friendly and intuitive a tool is.

SharePoint is demonstrably on the right track in terms of usability, but it urgently needs to eliminate teething problems. After all, the usability is predominantly rated positively by the users surveyed.

Nevertheless, the majority still consider usability to be the number one purchasing criterion when it comes to the introduction of portal software.

Microsoft has also recognized this point and, at first glance, only promotes corresponding promising advantages for the new mobile and team-related functions for the "intranet for the briefcase":

better usability, more productivity, improved networked and flexible working, and last but not least, the cloud is proclaimed as the carrier medium for the entry of the intranet into the digital era.

So the versatile frontend with its team sites and project pages will be even better and more individually usable in terms of usability?

Not quite, because looking at the SharePoint application alone as the basis for the next project or workflows is only one piece of the puzzle.

The biggest problem for good usability comes to light when it comes to data access from third-party systems, such as the ERP system from SAP.

The feat: exporting relevant data needed to work on the SharePoint interface from bulky and heavyweight SAP environments and getting it to the right place.

It is precisely this interface between the two system worlds that companies should attach great importance to if they want to offer their SAP and SharePoint investments in a solid link in a sensible and profitable way for their employees.

Data quality and reduction

Because in no time at all, a project-based collaboration platform in conjunction with an ERP system can become a fully-fledged project environment - including automatic billing of working hours for the project.

This has the advantage of improved data quality and a reduction in work steps. After all, who still wants to laboriously jump back and forth between two different system worlds in order to fish out the right data for their activity?

In addition, most SharePoint users do not have the necessary SAP knowledge to even perform this step anyway.

Training expenditure SAP

"Anyone who can operate an iPhone has no idea how the IT gears behind it mesh,"

Peter Wohlfarth from the Stuttgart-based software company Theobald Software compares the user behavior of SharePoint.

"Integrating data in this way would also completely eliminate the need for immense training efforts to become familiar with SAP"

the authorized signatory is convinced.

And as if this task alone didn't make life difficult enough for IT managers, according to the study there are also other third-party system integrations.

At just under 37 percent, nearly one-third of the decision-makers in the study are prioritizing integrating project management software into their SharePoint environment, followed by 27 percent who are currently looking at the interface between SAP and SharePoint.

Third place is shared by groupware/e-mail and CRM integrations.

Usability

When it comes to usability, the big rethink begins for enterprise IT, which previously tended to think and act in terms of short-term solutions to individual system interface problems that needed to be implemented.

"For them, it will no longer be about administering interfaces as best they can, but rather about thinking across systems: holistically increasing the quality of service for the end user through optimal usability"

Wohlfarth says.

Data bridges to SAP

His company helps with precisely this rethinking. It builds fast and reliable data bridges between the system worlds of SAP and SharePoint, precisely where there are none.

Or where you can no longer get anywhere with standard on-board tools from the SAP or Microsoft technical toolbox. A lot depends on the seamless integration of this interface in SharePoint.

Better information, more efficiency and productivity and, last but not least, better service. Those who do not think outside the box and consider the interlinking of their system worlds from a business perspective not only risk the usability and thus the use of platforms such as SharePoint, but also lose the trust of their users in IT in the long term.