By Dieter Schuller, VP of Sales and Business Development

We all know that SharePoint is a great tool for sharing documents. Unfortunately, it doesn’t integrate easily with the rest of your enterprise, including non-Microsoft applications and data sources. And documents alone are not enough—to be really useful, your portal needs to bring together all your users and connect to all your applications.

The SharePoint integration challenge: Why it’s so difficult to connect with the rest of the world

In order to make SharePoint a truly collaborative tool, you need to extend access beyond your employee base, to customers, partners, and vendors. Unfortunately, all of these populations are stored within different data silos, each with their own schemas and protocols. Without a virtualization layer, it’s not easy to authenticate across diverse user bases or authorize the appropriate access to each resource.

Five ways Identity and Context Virtualization can help

1. More Users, Less Hassle: SharePoint offers only a static definition of your user groups, so it’s difficult to add or manage new populations without spending a lot on custom coding. RadiantOne virtualization gives you a single logical view of all your users, without any overlap or duplications, so it’s easier to add populations and manage access to your portal.
2. Powerfully Simple Security: Information about users is often scattered across different systems. RadiantOne lets you build a complete profile, bringing together all the attributes for each person, regardless of where or how they’re stored—so you can perform finer-grained authorization and enforce policies contextually.
3. 360-degree Access to Data: SharePoint struggles when dealing with the structured data that’s found in your enterprise applications—especially when they’re not based on a Microsoft platform. RadiantOne lets you search across both your documents and your enterprise application stores so you can access everything, and see it all in context.
4. Seamless User Experience: Instead of forcing the average user to master every system, RadiantOne offers a common interface that lets everyone search across systems, just like you’d search a term on the web. So your users have secure access to all the information they need, wherever they are.
5. The Future’s Built In: RadiantOne can integrate attributes and contextual data from across your data silos, enabling a world of fine-grained, context-driven new services—all without making heavy investments in custom code or point solutions.

You need a better, more cost-effective way to integrate your entire enterprise. With RadiantOne Identity and Context Virtualization, you get the next-generation integration solution—so you can save money, add flexibility, and deliver a richer experience for all of your users.

Learn more about how Identity and Context Virtualization can supercharge your SharePoint deployment. Or catch us at TEC for a demo of our new SharePoint-powered social media interface.

Hope to see you there!