SAP PPM and Sharepoint

[Former Member]

Hi Folks,

Has anybody successfully used sharepoint to store project related documents (such as business case, meeting minutes, issue/risk logs etc)? When it comes to managing documents, I am aware of the options such as DMS and storing documents directly in the Portfolio Item / Project. However, is there an easy way to link documents in sharepoint to a Portfolio Item or Project?

Thanks,

Lashan

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Lashan,

Anytime you thought about checking in sharepoint documents urls with PPM projects.

Pramod

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Pramod, I had forgotten about that...

[Former Member]

No problem, Lashan.  I've some history that I can share that might hopefully give you some more ideas.

I was in a project sometime ago that involved "publishing" project artifacts from PPM to a 3rd Party document management solution - a collaboration tool much like SharePoint.  We used a combination of web service messaging (XML) and custom code to serialize documents from SAP to 3P tool via file drop.  The idea is, metadata needed to be 100% in-sync to make it work, but the beauty of this integration process was that there was always a 1:1 relationship between a document in PPM, and its final resting place in the archive/publishing environment.

That's one of the shortcomings of SharePoint - as NK said above, once a doc name or folder changes, you're pretty much stuck with a broken URL.  That's why metadata is so important - much like GUIDs are to us, you need to find a way to enforce a 1:1 relationship with a document.

And think, too, that if SP version control is turned on, the unique document GUIDs won't help, as with every version saved, a new file is in fact created to replace the old one as the "Current" version.

So, for your requirement, there are several factors to consider here.  Content Management.  Metadata Management.  Governance.  Version Management.  --- All these are topics to consider when dealing with document and content collaboration requirements. 

Now personally I love what SharePoint can offer by way of collaboration, but in true Microsoft fashion, the freedom to do anything you want comes at a cost.  The same is true when trying to integrate back to a rather controlled environment as we have in SAP.

[Former Member]

Thanks again for your insights Lawrence. We are still in the early days of implementing sharepoint, so chances are we'll keep things simple to start off with. But I do like your ideas above which will help if we decide to build some custom functionality.

[Former Member]

Yeah, the text value of the documents is one thing.   Have you considered creating links to folders?  I would assume that a doc lib and folder structure created from a SP template would also be rather static  (i.e. the URL won't change as drastically as documents within the folders).

Another crazy thing you can do is talk to a developer about rendering the SP folder within any of your PPM application / "tab pages".  That way there's less design required around how to maintain a what document hyperlink:   Let users pick the right one!

If you really need to create a unique identifier that enforces that a doc is unique, you could use some kind of custom interface that creates a lookup of a unique value like the SharePoint list ID and the document ID - which can then be used to "open" the unique document.

Hope that helps.

[Former Member]

Thanks Lawrence... good suggestions. Will keep these mind when we evaluate options.

[Former Member]

Hello Lashan,

Before you take this path ensure the SP links for the documentation wont be changed for any reason, if they are suseptable to change then you will end up with wrong or non funcitonal links.

[Former Member]

Thanks NK, yes you are absolutely right. I believe the sharepoint links are static, but we will verify this if we decide to go down this route.