Notes from SPSPhilly: Integrating SharePoint with LOB Applications

SharePoint Saturday Philly Session: Integrating SharePoint with Line of Business Applications by Gurpreet Maini Where to start?

• Selecting a farm topology
• Capacity planning
• Scalability approach
• Virtualization
• Disaster recovery strategy
• Deployment strategy
• Coding best practices
• Integration strategy

What do you want in SharePoint?

• Who will be using the site?
• What actions will they perform?
• What level of security is needed?

Taxonomy strategy

• Content types
• Site topology

Governance plan

• People
• Process
• Technology
• Policies

Selecting a farm topology? Single server, Small, medium, large Capacity planning equation: R = (P * H) + X R: request per second P: pages per second H: average hits per second X: search queries Disaster recovery and fault tolerance strategies Full or differential backups Recover accidental deletions Fault tolerance strategies Deployment best practices

• Package it! Features and solution deployment
• Package will ensure automated controlled process
• Best way to push and manage deployed code
  
  • Test, test, test
  • Even configuration

• Consider virtual environments for dev, test/UAT

What are features?

• They wrap custom development and gives new piece of info to SharePoint

Coding best practices

• Don’t alter SharePoint schema, assume it will change
• Use facilities that already exist, such as ULS logs, instead of building your own
• Note that accessing list by name performs a bit slower than accessing lists by index or unique id.
• Limit amount of work performed in an event receiver
• Don’t evaluate lists.items in a loop expression
• Dispose of types correctly. If you access from context, do not dispose.

Customer challenges

• Less custom integration code
• Deep integration of data
• New app types that blend data and collaboration
• Lack of structured data search
• Bridge portal and business application UI
• Centrally manage security, auditing, connections

Integration strategy

• Lob application integration strategies
  
  • Asp.net web part development
  • InfoPath 2007 forms
  • Web services development
  • Biztalk
  • BDC
  • Workflows
  • Features

InfoPath works good with BDC. Workflows can also be used to retrieve data from external apps. Infopath forms

• Infopath can talk with metadata.

Excel services

• Share spreadsheets via zero-footprint browser experience

Dashboards and web components

• KPIs, excel workbooks and SQL Server 2005, reporting services report

BDC architecture

• Features and components
• Shared service

Design motivations

• No code integration
• Centralized deployment
• Real-time access
• Centralized data security
• Designed for portal and collaboration
• Data query, indexing, personalization

BDC is not about?

• Transactions
• Workflows
• Data transformations
• Adapters

BDC metadata model

• Two purposes
  
  • Describe a system API
  • Give meaning to the API, make it easily usable

• Key objects
  
  • System
  • Entity
  • Method
  • Association

BDC application permissions

• Edit
• Execute
• Select in clients
• Set permissions

BDC web parts

• BDC List View Webpart

Business data search

• Search any db.web service not just documents
• No need to write iFilters or protocol handlers for business data
• No need to create html representations of data
• Highly customizable results
• Deep integrations with scopes

User profiles

• You can import profile from any user profile db
• Filter web parts with userprofile filters
• Map user profile property to field of entity
• Business specific targeting and personalization

BDC

• Configuration application
• Configuring key BDC web parts
• Searching business data
• Integration of business data with SharePoint lists

Development lifecycle

• Analyst defines business requirements
• Developer writes and tests app definition
• It pro uploads app definition
• Analyst builds the solutions using business data features

BDC API

• Runtime API
  
  • Browse metadata, execute methods, retrieve instances, traverse relationships
  • For custom app builders

• Admin API
  
  • Create, read, delete

BDC authentication

• Passthrough: the authentication mode quite literally passes credentials through from the front end (sp) to the back end (lob app identified via the BDC)
• Reverttoself: this mode reverts whatever impersonation might be done by IIS and authenticate against the BDC app using the identity of the IIS app pool itself.
• SSO: uses the sso subsystem for authentication to BDC
• rdbCredentials: it’s SSL

(Note: These notes were taken while blogging live. Please ignore any typos you may find. Thanks) Personal Note: If you want to learn more about BDC and integrating line of business applications with SharePoint, read the following wrox blox: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0026A6ATW