NASA Aims High With Integration of WebFOCUS and SharePoint

Cross-Domain Portal Organizes Information and Manages Activities for Launch Vehicle Processing Directorate

Two years ago the NASA Launch Vehicle Processing Directorate at the Kennedy Space Center purchased Microsoft SharePoint Server, a set of software components that enable developers to embed real-time business intelligence (BI) content into SharePoint portal pages with a few clicks. The move was meant to help users set up websites, share information, manage documents, and publish reports, but as users soon discovered, SharePoint provided no easy way to integrate reports and share information between the various portal sites.

Users in four areas – budget, IT, surveillance, and program support – often had to pass information back and forth via e-mail, defeating the purpose of a shared portal environment. "SharePoint is a great collaboration tool, but if you aren't careful it can cause you to build stovepipes," says Project Manager Ron Phelps, referring to domain-specific portals that are sequestered from each other. "In our case, there was no way for a manager to look across all portal sites simultaneously to share information."

One of the reasons for this disparity is because a particular SharePoint site can be structured to satisfy a group's requirements independent of the overall needs of the enterprise. Integration across groups is difficult if each group develops its own way of collecting and presenting information.

To solve this integration problem, the Directorate used a WebFOCUS BI Dashboard in conjunction with WebFOCUS Open Portal Services for SharePoint Server. For many years the Directorate has used the Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform to support Insight, a knowledge management application that lets engineers share information across systems, platforms, and organizational barriers.

A Collaborative Solution

As the Directorate revamped Insight in preparation for future space exploration programs, Phelps used a WebFOCUS BI dashboard to integrate information across Microsoft SharePoint portal sites, enabling a new level of collaboration and efficiency. WebFOCUS Open Portal Services also permits Phelps and his team to deliver BI content to SharePoint users with little or no programming.

"We're putting together a total management environment that allows us to draw on our previous investments in WebFOCUS and combine those assets with our investments in SharePoint," says Phelps, a long-time employee in the Directorate's Project Management office. "We use a WebFOCUS dashboard to integrate content across SharePoint portals. We also used WebFOCUS Open Portal Services to bring WebFOCUS reports directly into the SharePoint sites."

The Directorate's objectives were three-fold:

• Integrate WebFOCUS into the Directorate's intranet portals (websites)
• Incorporate comprehensive reporting and analysis capabilities into team collaboration sites
• Colocate WebFOCUS reports with other relevant business data, documents, schedules, and action items

Phelps handled the entire project based on his knowledge of the WebFOCUS BI Dashboard and Web Parts – ASP.NET server controls that enable users to modify the content, appearance, and behavior of SharePoint web pages directly from a browser.

Information Builders created a series of Web Parts to integrate WebFOCUS dashboards, reports, and applications with the SharePoint environment. It's easy to click a few buttons to bring WebFOCUS content into SharePoint sites. These widgets expand SharePoint's capabilities to host business information side by side with reports, documents, and project schedules, among other things.

Initially, Phelps rolled out the new system to the Project Control office, a division of approximately 25 employees within the Directorate charged with managing day-to-day business operations. He created a WebFOCUS dashboard that presents users with a consolidated view of the various portal domains, also called "worlds" in SharePoint parlance. Once this group bought in to the concept, he gradually expanded his efforts to encompass the Surveillance Group, which develops metrics, surveillance techniques, and documentation for the Directorate.

 "With help from the BI dashboard, we've devised a better way to organize information and manage
activities among worlds," Phelps says. "If it catches on it could expand to the entire Directorate."

How it Works

The new WebFOCUS dashboard environment contains tabs for individual SharePoint sites. An additional tab, dubbed Office World, provides shared information broken out into policies, documents, applications, and reports. Users can also select mail, calendar, notes, or tasks from this shared workspace (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. This BI dashboard integrates SharePoint content from four different business domains.

For example, if a user clicks on the Budget tab it opens a SharePoint site for that function (world). It contains links to WebFOCUS reports and other content, such as Microsoft Office files pertinent to that function. WebFOCUS handles the links in each SharePoint site using simple URLs within the WebFOCUS Managed Reporting environment.

The Impact of Collaboration

Having SharePoint portals available through a WebFOCUS dashboard helps the Directorate work more efficiently and track shared information between sites. "The WebFOCUS dashboard integrates each of our SharePoint worlds, so if we need data we can access it directly without having to log in separately to each world," says Phelps. "While each world has its own security and authentication requirements, WebFOCUS enables single sign-on access to all of them."

For example, if a user is authorized to work within the Budget World, that information will be displayed in that user's dashboard without having to log in to the Budget World. "WebFOCUS makes our portal environment much more convenient," sums up Phelps. "It simplifies collaboration by making it easier to share information."

In the future, Phelps hopes to integrate WebFOCUS Magnify with the new portal environment to improve the Directorate's search capabilities, as well as to bring in WebFOCUS Active Technology reports to automate the process of obtaining comments and reviews. He would also like to add more Web 2.0 capabilities, such as user forums and blogs, to the portal sites.

"The WebFOCUS BI Dashboard and Open Portal Services allow us to take advantage of comprehensive reporting, search, and analysis capabilities within our team collaboration sites," he concludes. "Information Builders customers that are using Microsoft SharePoint and already have an investment in WebFOCUS can bring all of these software assets forward to enhance their SharePoint environments."