One Front Door

Welcome to One Front Door, the official blog of the InFlight team. At InFlight, we believe in the One Front Door portal strategy. Let’s face it; the ERP user-interface has long disappointed stakeholders from CIO’s to end-users. While we respect and embrace ERP systems as the operational backbone vital to the modern organization, we believe that SharePoint represents the future of enterprise collaboration.

This means that SharePoint is likely to become the One Front Door through which employees, customers, and partners interact with and engage with the enterprise. That’s why we believe that integrating ERP systems into SharePoint is business critical. Organizations don’t want or need to rip and replace the embedded systems in which they’ve heavily invested. Instead, they simply need to find new and better ways to extend their existing IT investments.

Integrating ERP systems like PeopleSoft, Blackboard, and JD Edwards among others, into SharePoint can unlock a tremendous amount of value for an organization. It’s almost like tapping a hidden or previously inaccessible resource buried deep within the enterprise.

First, integrating an application like PeopleSoft into SharePoint will dramatically improve the user experience. This boosts employee productivity, leads to better quality data, reduces the burden on your help desk and more.

Second, think back if you can to when and why you first selected PeopleSoft as your HCM or Financials system. In many cases, PeopleSoft was, and still is, selected by organizations in part because the application is truly feature-rich.  PeopleSoft has thousands upon thousands of features and end-to-end process functionality that would truly provide an enterprise-level organization with a great deal of value.

The problem is that a lot of the features end up being difficult for the typical end-user to access. As a result, it goes unused. This is unfortunate for many reasons. Not only because you’ve paid to license it and you pay to maintain it but because you’re also missing out on the types of best-practices that drive good companies to greater levels of efficiency and profitability.

Integrating PeopleSoft into SharePoint can help expose functionality that is otherwise buried within the application and too cumbersome for users to access. Simply put, integrating PeopleSoft into SharePoint can unlock a great deal value. It’s a resource you already own and it’s just waiting to be tapped into.

So once again, welcome to One Front Door! The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for us to opine on various ERP to SharePoint integration techniques and challenges. Some of these posts will be technical in nature while others will present thoughts on the direction of SharePoint and its usefulness as a business productivity platform. In most cases, we’ll approach this from the perspective of a group of industry experts most concerned with tapping into the hidden value of enterprise systems.

We encourage your comments, feedback, and general participation in the discussion. From time to time, we may use this forum to; post the occasional survey; advertise that we’re hosting a webinar; or will be attending or sponsoring an upcoming Microsoft of Oracle conference. So check back frequently, comment often, and follow us on twitter @inflightcorp