Integrating Siebel CRM with Office SharePoint Server 2007

Summary: Learn how to integrate Siebel CRM 7.8 with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Introduction to Siebel CRM Integration with SharePoint Server 2007

The enterprise domains of most organizations usually have heterogeneous applications, and key business data is available to the users across the applications such as Siebel CRM, SAP, or PeopleSoft. In such scenarios, there is a need to have the key data available to users in a single-stop Web portal. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers one such portal to organizations around the world.

This article provides prescriptive guidance on the appropriate approach to build an integration solution between Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Siebel CRM 7.8 by using Web services. After integration, Office SharePoint Server 2007 users can view key data from the various modules in the Siebel system.

Integration Scope

The scope of this integration is to provide a read-only view of the data retrieved from line-of-business (LOB) applications—in this case Siebel CRM. How to insert and delete data in Siebel CRM from Office SharePoint Server 2007 is beyond the scope of this article.

Integration Benefits and Values

You can achieve the following benefits from this integration solution.

• The solution provides a one-stop data access of different LOB applications.

  
  

• The solution requires no training for SharePoint users in Siebel because they can access the Siebel data on the SharePoint portal.

  
  

• Office SharePoint Server 2007 features enable Siebel data to improve the efficiency of the SharePoint users, and improve the level of service provided to the customer.

  
  

• Users of Office SharePoint Server 2007 can access the different Siebel features from the Office SharePoint Server portal easily.

Solution Configuration Overview

The Business Data Catalog, a new integration feature in Office SharePoint Server 2007, provides the means to integrate data directly to LOB applications through Web services. The Business Data Catalog enables users to retrieve and display key business data from LOB applications in sites, lists, and user profiles within an Office SharePoint Server portal without any custom coding. The Business Data Catalog also supports features such as specific search, full text search, filtered data views, and so on.

Figure 1 provides a high-level overview of the participating components for this integration solution.

Figure 1. Solution Overview diagram

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