Author: John Kelly
Introduction & Options
The best news I have heard about Duet Enterprise came the moment I learned of its integration via SharePoint Business Connectivity Services (BCS). With that, Duet Enterprise delivers all the capabilities one would expect of searching content from line of business systems with SharePoint. More specifically, Duet Enterprise provides the ability to search SAP data through BCS. This is possible using the enterprise search features of either SharePoint Server 2010 or Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. In this post, I will focus entirely on the SharePoint Server 2010 option.
At a high level, the steps required to enable searching SAP data with Duet Enterprise and SharePoint Server 2010 include: Preparing profile pages, creating external content types (ECTs), indexing the content, setting up the search user interface, and testing.First, create the entity profile pages for rendering the data when the users select search results. Next, connect SharePoint BCS to the SAP data source by creating an ECT that maps to the target data. After the ECT creation, indexing the target data becomes possible. At a minimum, indexing requires setting up a content source and starting a crawl. In some cases, it is desirable to configure a crawl rule, but it is not always necessary and thus omitted for brevity. After the first crawl has completed, verify that it processed correctly. Following confirmation of the successful crawl, the content is ready for searching. From there, enable the SharePoint search user interface by creating a basic search center site. Once that is out of the way, proceed with testing the search against SAP data by visiting the search center site, entering a keyword search, and verifying that SharePoint returns appropriate results.For detailed instructions on performing these steps, please refer to the following article:Note: The article above includes all of the instructions necessary to implement search against SAP data with SharePoint Server 2010 and Duet Enterprise 1.0. However, the instructions included in the section regarding ECTs would need significant modification in order to support SAP data. In particular, the back-end data source settings require changing from the SQL Server database configuration to one appropriate for a group of ABAP web services hosted on SAP NetWeaver 7.02.Conclusion
Once the implementation details are completed, users should be able to enter queries for SAP data and retrieve search results accordingly.
Note: This approach does not result in security trimmed search results. In other words, users will be able to see all the search results returned by their query whether they have permission to view them or not. If the user selects a search result that they do not have permission to read, access will fail and an authorization error message will render on the entity profile page.?
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