The rise of strategic business networks, globally distributed teams, and outsourcing have increased the need for effective collaboration tools. Sharing key data with your partners, suppliers, contractors, and customers is now a critical part of day-to-day business.

Unfortunately, email is too limited for many types of collaboration, and many third-party collaboration tools offer cumbersome user experiences and limited access to back-end data. However, according to Alan Mendel and Eric Stajda of LeverX, Collaboration Folders (cFolders) from SAP offers unparalleled collaboration options that are secure, relatively painless to implement, and offer great flexibility for sharing multiple types of data via the Web. When implemented correctly, cFolders offer the elusive “single source of truth” for a variety of object types, say Mendel and Stajda.

“When most of your information is stored within an SAP system that’s behind the firewall, it becomes very difficult to define how to share information from your SAP environment that’s critical to the success of your partners or subcontractors without putting your SAP environment or information at risk,” says Mendel, vice president and co-founder of LeverX. “cFolders lives outside the firewall with its own security capabilities that can leverage the security of the SAP environment, yet allows partners, suppliers, and other external entities to access that information easily and securely.”

What Is cFolders?

Because it was designed to support the sharing of computer assisted design (CAD) drawings, bills of material (BOMs), and other product development objects, cFolders is grouped into the Collaboration Projects (cProjects) suite within the program and project management area of SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM). However, cFolders offers several advantages that make it an attractive option for a wide range of uses (see sidebars for example scenarios). Those advantages include:

Support for a wide range of object types. The Web is full of online collaboration software for sharing spreadsheets and Microsoft Word documents. However, cFolders is unique in its ability to support a large variety of object types (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Object types supported by cFolders

“cFolders allows you to put not just documents out there, but also bills of material and many different object types in that environment. That’s something that distinguishes it from (Microsoft) Sharepoint,” says Mendel. “With Sharepoint you can share a bill of materials, but only if it’s saved as an Excel file.”

See Figure 2 for an illustration of a bill of material (BOM) shared with cFolders.

Figure 2

Sharing a bill of material

Among the most useful object types are discussion objects, which save conversational threads between collaborators to document how a group arrived at a particular decision. Users also have the ability to extend the system by creating their own object types, says Stajda.

“Maybe you have a form in which you collect information on product issues from your partner. With the generic object in cFolders, you can create a form to capture the data you’re looking for. This way you can be notified right away when new issues are brought up, and you can pull that data back into the SAP system and start to drive a back-end process,” says Stajda.

Fast and secure authorizations. The authorization concept in cFolders streamlines the security process. Rather than asking the IT team to create or change roles or perform back-end security tasks, the owner of a collaboration within cFolders has the ability to define who has access to what information. Authorization can be doled out at the object level or collaboration level, giving the creator flexibility to determine which users can access which information.

“The authorization concept in cFolders is very good, because it allows you to set up collaborative spaces that are very specific to a partner. Even at a lower level, you can create sets of folders or sets of items that have very specific authorization capabilities,” says Stajda.

For example, you may set up a folder that is just for outgoing documents that your partners can read but not alter. You can also have an incoming documents folder, where a partner can place documents that you then import to the SAP system.

Depending on authorization settings, partners can read, alter or add documents, product drawings, or other types of objects to a shared space within a cFolder, which then automatically updates back-end SAP data as authorized.

No additional SAP software required. While cFolders is part of the SAP PLM application, it can be used as a standalone product, say Mendel and Stajda. This is especially beneficial when collaborating with partners who may use non-SAP systems.

“There are some companies we talk to that use cFolders for standalone processes that are not connected to other SAP technologies. It’s not the standard, but some use it for things like internal collaboration on documents, for example,” says Stajda.

However, cFolders  integrates with SAP’s cProjects project management tool, as well as SAP PLM and SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM), giving it advanced functionality for sharing SAP data.

Subscriptions and notifications. cFolders includes built-in communication that keeps all parties updated when a relevant object has been changed. The system sends an internal message and an email to any subscribing collaboration member. 

“As I’m putting data into the collaboration, I want to know when things happen with that data. I can subscribe to a folder, so that when anything happens in that folder I get notified. That makes it very easy to know when I need to check back into the folder,” says Stajda.

Proven cost-effectiveness. While there are several online collaboration tools available to companies, cFolders may offer the best combination of features for the lowest cost, says Mendel.

“We work with one company that compared the cost of collaboration with SAP software versus SharePoint, and it came back that the cost of SAP was dramatically lower than SharePoint, even with the higher implementation costs,” he says.

Considerations for Implementing cFolders

While cFolders may offer a welcome boost to your company’s collaborative capabilities, Mendel and Stajda point out three key considerations for those seeking to implement it:

Are you willing to keep it vanilla? The typical cFolders implementation project lasts around 60 days, according to Stajda, with most of that time spent mapping out-of-the-box features to your current business processes.

“There’s not a lot of configuration that needs to happen,” says Stajda. “It’s mostly figuring out how you’re going to use it and how you’re going to secure your data.”

Does it fit with your infrastructure? Because cFolders is designed to be accessible to external partners, the data inside cannot be hidden behind the company’s firewall (Figure 3). This presents a roadblock for organizations with very strict data governance policies.

Figure 3

Where cFolders fits into the company infrastructure

“A lot of companies are not keen on having something outside the firewall that somehow connects to their back-end SAP system. Early in the project you have to figure out what it means to have this data outside the firewall, and what you need to do to enable that,” says Stajda.

SAP offers several ways to secure servers that reside outside the firewall, according to Stajda. However, convincing the company’s senior leadership may not be easy without developing a thorough security and authorization plan beforehand.

How are you going to train the collaborators? The typical end user can be brought up to speed on cFolders with just a few hours of training, either in the office or via WebEx or some other platform for external users. However, there are a few things to consider when planning your training program, says Stajda. For example, rather than rolling out cFolders collaboration to all partners at once, some companies find it advantageous to start with a few key partners and roll it out to the rest later. “You may want to collaborate with five or so key partners that you exchange a lot of data with first. Then you can expand beyond that,” says Stajda.

Companies also have to factor in licensing costs when planning for a cFolders deployment. Whether you’re collaborating with 10 partners or 1,000 partners, you have to figure out how you’re going to assign and control the licensing costs associated with the tool, says Stajda.

Other Resources

“Provide Visibility of Your Company’s Assets in a Changing Business Model,” by Lynn Fair.

“Engineering ControlCenter in SAP PLM Eases Transition for Engineers,” by Peter Demtschenko.

Davin Wilfrid

Davin Wilfrid was a writer and editor for SAPinsider and SAP Experts. He contributed case studies and research projects aimed at helping the SAP ecosystem get the most out of their existing technology investments.

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