BCP for SharePoint
The use of Excel spreadsheets for collaborative planning is something that is core to almost every enterprise in the world. These “applications” can be extremely complex, comprised of very large workbooks with millions of cells of data, and typically involve sharing data with back-end ERP or other enterprise systems. Moving these Excel based applications to SharePoint would be a natural next step. However, SharePoint today is ill-equipped to handle it due to its file-level versus cell-level content management capabilities.
The Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP) is being used by companies around the globe to automate complex, mission-critical spreadsheet-based processes where file sharing technologies are not enough. These companies have adopted BCP’s collaboration technology to automate processes including demand & supply planning, promotion management, financial budgeting, project management, and product lifecycle management. By adding BCP, SharePoint can become the centralizing force for all collaborative applications in the enterprise.
BCP-Enabled SharePoint
Boardwalktech has integrated the capabilities of BCP with SharePoint to extend SharePoint’s reach into mission critical collaborative planning applications. “BCP-enabled SharePoint” not only increases IT’s reach in solving business problems for their user community, but strengthens SharePoint’s position as a platform that delivers hard benefits to the many companies who rely on manual Excel-based planning processes to optimize the planning, manufacturing, and delivery of their products and services.
Users of BCP enabled SharePoint can access the capabilities of BCP while interacting with BCP enabled Excel workbooks. The capabilities of BCP are all derived from the core “positional data management” technology at the heart of BCP. The traditional file model is replaced by managing cells and ranges of cells as SQL objects in SQL Server. Excel based process users can now access BCP capabilities while working with a BCP enabled process workbook. Some of the key distinctions include:
- Cell-level
versus file-level data management
- SQL level integration between enterprise systems and
Excel based data
- Concurrent Usage of Excel data without check-out
- Central Management of Excel Templates (structure) and
instances (data and formulae)
- Central management of entitlements and security down
to the cell level
- Dynamic reporting with cell level data refresh
- Superior view and update performance through
Submit/Refresh data sharing model
- Workbook level change management and propagation
without programming
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