Extending SharePoint with Enterprise Business Process Management

Enterprises of today are faced with a key question: How do you justify the investment in an enterprise BPM suite when an investment in Microsoft SharePoint has already been made. This whitepaper examines how SharePoint can be extended with an enterprise BPM suite and determines how both these technologies can co-exist.

Introduction With an adoption rate of 60-70% across organizations of all sizes and more than three million users across the globe, SharePoint is one of the most widely used platforms for collaboration and content management. SharePoint is an enterprise-class collaboration and content management platform that can be extended to perform different functions – it can be a portal, a document repository, a search engine, an enterprise content management (ECM) platform, an intranet, a web content management platform, a workflow tool, or a development platform.

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harePoint’s widespread adoption in most enterprise environments, small learning curve, and flexibility in organizing information has contributed to the increased interest in its workflow capabilities. Most organizations are seriously considering the idea of implementing SharePoint for their business process management (BPM) requirements. Today, enterprises are faced with two key challenges: ? How to get the most out of their SharePoint investments? ? How to justify investment in a standalone BPM solution when SharePoint can be used for the same purpose? In many organizations, the unplanned adoption of SharePoint, in the last few years, has led to a number of problems

including inadequate workflow processes, disorganized content, and lack of cohesive site creation strategy. Improving process management functionality is still one of the most common uses of SharePoint. But, since most of the companies are still new to BPM and do not really know enough about workflow in general, they cannot easily and quickly differentiate between what SharePoint offers and how more value can be added using a robust BPM product. SharePoint is an extremely successful product, sometimes described as the “Swiss Army knife” of software. It offers some simple, out-of-the-box workflows such as Disposition Approval, Collect Feedback, Collect Signatures and Three-State Workflow. However, if a company wants to design and deploy more complex business processes, it would require a combination of other Microsoft tools like SharePoint Designer, InfoPath and Visual Studio.

Leveraging SharePoint for Enterprise-level BPM Today almost all the BPM Suites available in the market provide Microsoft SharePoint integration capability. It is only a matter of time that enterprises will start contemplating about the value of leveraging a standalone BPM solution for their mission critical business workflows and integrating it with the existing Microsoft SharePoint platform. Some of the key business benefits of extending SharePoint with an enterprise class BPM suite are as follows: A BPM solution can facilitate the development of enterprise-wide workflows for various organizational processes, resulting in enhanced collaboration and improved decision making. Using a BPM solution along with SharePoint can enable centralized process management and analysis. It can also make business processes highly flexible and manageable. Reduced costs and improved return on investment (ROI) Extending SharePoint with a BPM solution can help improve the overall productivity of an enterprise. Managing processes and content across the enterprise become much easier with automation.business process improvement (BPI) life cycle.

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lthough Microsoft markets SharePoint platform primarily as a collaboration and content management platform, many organizations tend to extend SharePoint for enterprise-wide BPM support. This is because the organizations that have already invested in SharePoint are keen on getting the most out of their SharePoint investment, and they find it easy to create basic office workflows using SharePoint. Fundamentally SharePoint is not a BPMS (Business Process Management Suite) tool; it is rather a content management tool that provides features to support advanced business process management applications—but only after integration with other tools, such as Info Path, Visual Studio, Workflow Foundation, BizTalk Server and Outlook. Leveraging SharePoint as BPM software or tool requires highly skilled resources, time and focused development efforts unlike a BPM Platform, which is user friendly and is relatively much easier to customize. And, this is the reason why many organizations that are enthusiastic about implementing business process management in SharePoint ultimately end up spending a lot of resources, time and money in the long run.

While SharePoint supports site collection, it becomes quite difficult to manage when a workflow needs to span organizational boundaries. In scenarios where a user needs to go one step back in the workflow, possibly due to oversight, a robust BPM solution can be a better option. Multi-level approvals are also not supported in SharePoint. The enterprises that are attempting to use SharePoint as a BPM solution will eventually realize the limitations as they mature to a full business process improvement (BPI) life cycle.

Where SharePoint tapers off while BPM picks up Following are the reasons why SharePoint, in isolation, poses challenges for design of complex workflows and enterprise-level business process management: Features for supporting a true BPM

processes that cross organizational boundaries or involve partners or customers.

Creating simple office workflows is quite easy with SharePoint. However, when it comes to complex workflows and enterprise-wide implementation, SharePoint alone might not be easy to use and manage. Although Microsoft provides separate tools for creating advanced workflows such as SharePoint Designer and InfoPath, creating seamless business processes without lots of custom coding is a difficult, time consuming and risky task.

Lack of governance tools is yet another issue when implementing SharePoint across the enterprise. Since creating individual sites is quite easy with SharePoint, organizations might see a rapid increase in the number of individual sites and site collections – which can result in serious governance-related issues.

Long-term total cost of ownership (TCO)

Custom Coding

Managing and monitoring SharePoint customizations might prove to be a tedious job and can exceed the cost of managing a third-party BPM platform in the long run.

Building complex, real-world workflows with SharePoint calls for a lot of custom coding and customization, which can result in project delays, increased operational expenditure, and cause a number of application flexibility related issues. Creating advanced workflows and process customization requires highly skilled SharePoint developers or extensive training of in-house IT staff, which might strain organization’s resources and affect other business priorities.

Site Collections Although a SharePoint Site Collection is quite good for organizing content, acting as a container for metadata to which processes relate, it might create constraints on business

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Governance

nterprises interested in leveraging SharePoint for BPM must understand that SharePoint is a platform, which needs further customization to extend its basic workflow capabilities for specific organization processes.

Extending SharePoint with a BPM suite SharePoint’s workflow functionalities are somewhat limited for enterprise-level BPM. Therefore, it makes sense for enterprises to invest in a standalone BPM solution, which can help optimize their existing SharePoint investments and extend Advanced Workflow features to the Microsoft SharePoint platform.

These suites can also offer advanced features for developing complex workflows and graphics, and improving business processes. Stand-alone BPM software can also be used as a business application platform to build BPM enabled solutions, such as: Document Management Accounts Payable Enterprise Risk Management Leave Management Systems

BPM suites are meant to provide enterprises with a robust, collaborative platform to help automate business processes and documentcentric activities that are required to achieve organizational goals.

Invensys Skelta and Microsoft SharePoint

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kelta’s SharePoint Accelerator extends BPM and advanced workflow features to the Microsoft SharePoint platform, enabling maximum utilization and broader adoption of native SharePoint capabilities.

Skelta BPM can complement Microsoft’s SharePoint by: Supporting the development of advanced workflows across the enterprise Facilitating the creation of processes for multiple SharePoint sites Built in SharePoint activities and wizards used within workflows Supporting SharePoint Lists and providing advanced Forms Designer Providing advanced BPM features like Dashboards, Reports, KPIs and Queues

Why Skelta BPM? Invensys Skelta has extensive experience in successfully deploying BPM solutions across the globe and its BPM software is used across industries. Skelta BPM offers a wide range of functionality, ranging from multi level approvals/escalations to Business Activity Monitoring and covers the entire spectrum of BPM requirements.

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Skelta BPM is 100 percent embeddable BPM Workflow framework built on the Microsoft .NET platform.

By providing a flexible BPM platform, we help our clients build what they need most while enabling them tap the full advantages of their existing Microsoft technologies.

Conclusion Although SharePoint is the most widely used content management and collaboration platform, the basic workflow capabilities and a developer centric platform pose as a glaring lacuna for most end users in an enterprises. Creating simple workflows in SharePoint is very easy, but designing complex workflows and enterprise-level business process management is quite a challenging task. A range of other Microsoft products as well as significant investments in people, methodology and training is imperative in order to realize a rich BPM experience from SharePoint platform. SharePoint can efficiently contribute to a company's overall BPM strategy only when integrated with a more comprehensive and robust BPM product from a third-party vendor. A robust BPM solution can efficiently complement and extend Microsoft SharePoint workflow functionality without the need for custom coding. There is room for both SharePoint and BPM in an enterprise environment, provided the companies know what they want to do with their existing SharePoint environment and how they want to proceed on their BPM journey. They must find BPM-oriented solutions that will be easier to customize, and more closely designed for their business requirements.

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