Over the year’s companies have reached out to us with a major need to integrate SharePoint with CA PPM. We have learned a great deal about the business challenges these companies face. From management needing consolidated up-to-date reports across systems, to project managers requiring a better way to manage documentation and document approvals. The challenges list goes on and on, and we can proudly say that our SharePoint Solution for CA PPM solves most of them.

During the sales process, we are often asked to provide a list of what our SharePoint Connector can do compared to CA’s offering. In fact, CA themselves have requested this comparison many times when they resell our SharePoint products. So, I thought I’d publish it so everyone has access.

Differences Between IT-ROI’s and CA’s SharePoint Integration CORE FEATURES
SharePoint embedded in CA PPM	No	Yes
Extracts data from CA PPM	Yes	Yes
Automatic Mapping of Projects to SharePoint	No	Yes
Automatically create CA PPM project as Site, Library or Folder in SharePoint	No	Yes
Supports CA PPM – Risks, Issues and Change Requests	Yes	Yes
Drag & Drop documents into knowledge store	No	Yes
Full integration with Microsoft Office 365	No	Yes
Ability to map network drives to CA PPM Projects Dynamically	No	Yes (real time)
Utilize SharePoint as the document repository for Projects	Yes, it supports SharePoint functionality	Yes
Fully integrated team and/or collaboration security from CA PPM to SharePoint	No	Yes
CA PPM Data Duplicated in SharePoint	Yes	No SharePoint is utilized as the document repository
Bi-directional update for tasks, task dates, assignments, and timesheets, risks, issues, change requests, team, allocation, cost plans and status reports	No	Yes
Automatically pass rights to SharePoint from CA PPM (allows PMs to control SharePoint security through CA PPM)	No Known Issues: Proxy Difficulty	Yes
Gantt list in SharePoint for Tasks, calendar view for task list as well as full calendar drag/drop support	Yes	Yes
Supports data as SharePoint lists	No	Yes
Ability to create any bi-directional integration with core systems	No	Yes

The comparison speaks for itself, the biggest takeaways are:

• The ability to create any bi-directional integration.
• Consistent real-time reporting.
• Fully automated security, and site/project creation features. 
• Documentation management.

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Go to Video & Get the Files

CA PPM GEL Scripting Best Practices:

List is from the CA slide deck used in the webinar, provided by: Sean Harp and Kelly Limberg with CA Technologies

1. All SQL and SOAP tags should be wrapped in gel exception handling.
2. All SQL tags should utilize bind parameters.
3. All debug statements should be controlled via a parameter that is optional when needed.
4. All complex SQL statements need to be analyzed for performance implications.  This can be done via EXPLAIN PLAN in a SQL tool.
5. If the GEL script is performing XOG read/write actions in a loop, the XOG login and logout actions must be outside of the loop.
6. SQL update statements should not be utilized against anything other than custom tables or ODF_CA_<obj> tables.
7. SQL insert/delete statements should only be used on custom tables.

The Action Items XOG API was unpublished functionality that CA developed for CA Clarity PPM Version 12. We got our hands on it, and built an App to enable Action Item approval amongst other things from a mobile device.

We love to share, so here you go.

During our XOG best practices webinar a few weeks ago, the following question was asked:

XOG Best Practices Questions and Answers Transcript:

Q – Can we get API to XOG action items?
A – Ask our Expert Support Team, and they will send you the API call for updating Action Items.

Since that time, we have been receiving numerous requests for this directly to Federico himself, so without further ado:

Here are some notes from our lead software engineer:

For this line in the ai_write.xml (part of the download package) <actionItemApproval actionItemDbId=””+aiId+”” assigneeDbId=””+assId+”” status=””+assStatus+”” />

• The values for the variables aiId & assId come from the ib_out_ai query
• The values for the variables assStatus come from the ib_out_ai_lk query

A big usage note with the Action Items XOG API is that the sessionId being used MUST be for the Clarity resource that the Action Item is Assigned to. A user can only update the Action Items that are assigned to them.

Action Items XOG API