BO Sharepoint to Database

general discussion
1

Hi Experts,

I have the following requirement, Could any one suggest a solution on this

We are going to implement BO sharepoint portal 2007 in our application, i read regarding the same and have a clear idea of how that could be implemented.

Please clarify the following questions.

Where does the data from MS sharepoint forms/lists reside?
Can we query from that datasource directly?
Would it be possible to ETL that data to a relational database to create BO universe for reporting?

Thanks,
Goutham

Goutham (BOB member since 2008-08-20)

2

I have the same question!

Sharepoint lists are increasingly being used as data sources, and it would be great to be able to add them into a universe :slight_smile:

cjweis (BOB member since 2003-10-02)

3

I have implemented this at my company. We developed a VB script to extract the sharepoint list data from a web service into an xml file. Unfortunately I’m not too familiar with VB so I can’t help you too much with that. I’m also not too familiar with sharepoint but I know that you cannot point a universe directly against the sharepoint database. The sharepoint administrator had to enable some type of sharepoint web service in order for this to work. We used Data Integrator to call the VB script, extract the data into an XML file then load the data from the XML file into an oracle database. It works but maintenance is a bit clunky. Everytime the sharepoint list is updated (add new columns) you need to update the DI job to pull in the right columns from the XML file. We found that often someone would update the definition of the sharepoint list but not tell anyone from IT - so we would scramble to figure out why the DI job failed.

bension (BOB member since 2005-09-01)

4

@bension, Thanks for that description.

That is exactly the design that I want to avoid. Business Objects needs to either allow Sharepoint lists as personal data files, or add Sharepoint lists as a feature of the semantic layer (maybe as a feature in Data Federator).

I wonder if Crystal Reports can connect to a Sharepoint list? If so, that could be another option at the report layer.

cjweis (BOB member since 2003-10-02)

5

Theoretically you can make the web service a data source so that you can connect directly to sharepoint however we were not able to figure out how to get that working.

bension (BOB member since 2005-09-01)

6

OK, we’re reported from lists and it’s trickey!

So what about extracting data from a document (excel file) store within sharepoint using DI. We’ve been able to publish a file to a sharepoint location using BOE.
We activated web client for this.

So… I put it out there - can you read data from a file in Sharepoint?

Thanks

bomaster :australia: (BOB member since 2006-09-08)