Duet Enterprise 2.0 Online / Extends reach of SAP data into Microsoft Cloud

SharePoint Online

Most significant in SharePoint 2013 is that it is ‘built for the cloud [1] [2]’. The motiviation for Microsoft to focus on cloud-enablement is market-demand: a considerable subset of its SharePoint customer-base struggles with hosting and operating SharePoint themselves on premise. And because of this struggle, a lot of SharePoint-using organizations are reluctant to upgrade their SharePoint deployment. Via the Cloud / on demand offering, Microsoft aims to reach 2 goals: relieve organizations from the burden of SharePoint operations, and enable those same organizations to stay on par with the feature progress in the SharePoint and Office platform. Microsoft plans an upgrade release cycle of every 90 days for SharePoint 2013 Online.

Duet Enterprise 2.0 Online

The SharePoint 2013 cloud offering also has positive implication for Duet Enterprise deployment options. In addition to the existing on premise installation option, Duet Enterprise 2.0 offers a cloud / on demand alternative. Extend the reach of your SAP data into the Microsoft cloud. In such infra architecture, the SAP landscape is on premise, but Microsoft SharePoint 2013 is serviced in the cloud.

The Duet Enterprise hybrid infrastructure setup imposes following requirements on the local and remote + shared environments:

• Each customer organization must [still] deploy the Duet Enterprise 2.0 SAP Add-On in own on premise SAP landscape; installed on the SAP NetWeaver Gateway 2.0 system
• SharePoint 2013 Online must include the Duet Enterprise 2.0 SharePoint Add-On
• The connectivity between on premise SAP Add-On and cloud hosted SharePoint Add-On requires a ‘light’ local SharePoint 2013 node. This node functions as intermediate layer ('broker') from internal SAP Gateway to SharePoint online and vice versa.
• Mutual trust-relationship between the on premise SAP Add-On and the on premise or cloud hosted SharePoint Add-On is based on X.509 certificates; no longer on SAML. The X.509 certificates are provisioned by the Duet Enterprise SSO Generator on the ('light') SharePoint 2013 node on premise.

Availability

Duet Enterprise 2.0 is already General Available for on premise deployments, but not yet for the cloud. It necessary follows upon the public availability of SharePoint 2013 Online, with the inclusion of Duet Enterprise 2.0 SharePoint Add-On. Microsoft has not yet announced the release date, but realistic expectation is ‘somewhere’ Q1/Q2 2013. Then also more details will be communicated on how to configure and operate Duet Enterprise 2.0 in a potential multi-tenancy SharePoint Online context.