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:
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