There is a new ZDNet video interview with Shai Agassi, member of the management board and president of PTG (Product and Technology Group) at SAP. Although the written introduction mentions the competition with Oracle the video is not only about this competition. Topics they touch are:

• What’s the current mySAP customer base in comparison to R/3
• What is the good thing about Duet (the integration of SAP backend into Microsoft Office)
• Business Process Platform (BPP) - two parts: the technology platform NetWeaver and the semantic understanding and interfaces
• SAP Developer Network (SDN)
• Web Services
• Industry Value Networks and ES Community
• Differences between the offer to large, medium and small businesses (NetWeaver as a basis stays but the semantics of enterprise services change, i.e. less complex but not completly different processes for small companies - only a special “dialect” so that integration between large and small businesses along the value chain is still possible)
• The competition with Oracle (the growth rates were better for Oracle in the last quater but long term comparison is said to be more important)
• Importance of SOA (decision regarded as important as the decision e-mail or no e-mail)

Tags: BPP, Diploma Thesis, ESA, ESOA, NetWeaver, SAP, SOA
Categories: SAP enterprise SOA
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In the last SAP-related post I presented SDN, Service Marketplace and SAP Help Portal as valuable ressources for information about SAP products, especially development based on NetWeaver. How-to guides and tutorials, for example the CAF Tutorial Center, are a further way of getting insight based on concrete examples. However, while reading all those guides, help pages and so forth, I often thought that they don’t provide me with the insight I wished to get from them. Especially the how-to guides and tutorials normally guide you on a narrow path, without looking left or right, not discussing any alternatives and not explaining why a certain route is taken. This is very helpful in case the topic of the guide exactely matches your needs but as soon as you depart one step from the path or don’t like to stupidly follow without knowing why, the help provided is very limited.

In addition to more wholistic How-To guides which explain the different possibilities of interaction between architecture layers, what I probably would need are Why-To or When-To-Use guides:

• When-To-Use CAF core instead of Integration Builder for service definition
• Why-To design workflows and processes with Guided Procedures instead of Business Workflow or ccBPM
• When-To-Use Visual Composer Web Dynpro iViews instead of Flash iViews
• Why-To access services through Visual Composer and not directly in Guided Procedures
• Why-To select this option not the other one

Tags: CAF, Diploma Thesis, ESA, ESOA, NetWeaver, SAP, Visual Composer
Categories: SAP enterprise SOA
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Concerning SAP enterprise SOA / ESA, NetWeaver and other SAP products, you can find a lot of information on the internet. One important resource is the SAP Developer Network (SDN), where you can find a lot of articles, forums and blogs to various topics. Another one is the NetWeaver area of the Service Marketplace (customer or partner login required), where there is information on the products, release information and so on.

Also very important is the SAP Help Portal. There you find extensive documentation for the whole product range (sections: mySAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver, mySAP Business Suite, SAP R/3 and R/3 Enterprise, SAP for Industries, SAP xApps, SAP Solution Manager). I was looking a lot at the NetWeaver section, but I got confused by the structure every time. First of all you have different main topics: IT Scenarios at a Glance, Power User’s Guide, Technology Consultant’s Guide, Administrator’s Guide – Technical Operations Manual, Administrator’s Guide – Security Guide, Developer’s Guide and SAP NetWeaver by Key Capability. But when you choose one it does not mean that the topic name is always visible when you dive further in. Example: You choose Developer’s Guide, then Fundamentals, then Creating Composite Applications - what happens? At least I get lost as Creating Composite Applications becomes the top of the tree and I don’t see that I’m in the area of the Developer’s Guide. Furthermore there is no way to get one layer up again. The thing get’s really confusing when subsections of the guides link between each other as you sometimes don’t realize that you are in another area. As all the guides are touching the topics from a different (but sometimes overlapping) view and the navigation structure often is very deep, it’s hard to gather all the possibly important information for one topic together and even after weeks I found new sections I haven’t seen before. So if anyone has recommendations on how to better deal with those help pages I will really appreciate it.

To get a better overview and to have the possibility to jump up a layer after I got lost in a subsection, I created a document with the navigation structure of the SAP NetWeaver 2004s SPS09 guides/documentation. Of course there is not the complete structure in there but at least part of it. In areas related to the Composite Application Framework, Visual Composer etc. you can dive deeper than in others. But at least you get an overview of the whole documentation. I don’t know whether it helps you, at least it helped me a bit (although it did not solve the problem completely).

So if you like, here is my excel sheet:
SAP NetWeaver 2004s SPS09 Navigation Structure.

At the left side of the rows you find + / -, so you can open or close specific rows of the excel sheet.

After clicking on the link in the excel, the SAP Library opens. There you have to click on the icon at the right of the headline to locate the document in the navigation structure.

Tags: CAF, Diploma Thesis, ESA, ESOA, NetWeaver, SAP, Visual Composer
Categories: SAP enterprise SOA
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I already mentioned that I’m currently writing my “Diplomarbeit”, a Service-Oriented-Architecture-Oriented-Diplom-Arbeit (SOAODA) to be more precise.
The exact title is “Design and Implementation of a Service-oriented Information System Architecture Based on a Case Study” (Konzeption und Realisierung einer service-orientierten IS-Architektur anhand eines Fallbeispiels). As the Case Study will be based on SAP concepts and NetWeaver technology, the thesis basically divides into four main parts:

• Explanation of vendor-neutral SOA fundamentals.
• SAP’s view on SOA, i.e. enterprise services architecture (ESA) - or enterprise SOA (ESOA) as it is officially called since May.
• Procedure for designing and implementing SOA.
• Designing and Implementing a little scenario - in fact it’s a mini-composite application using web services, guided procedures, visual composer and CAF core.

So the topic is really broad, but as SOA is generally discussed very diverse (starting from a business concept to pure technology) it was most interesting for me to get an overview and not to focus too much on one certain aspect. Of course their are tons of information currently flying around and it is hard to filter because every IT-oriented author, magazine and company seems to have something to say about but explanations/promises are often vague and terms are differently used and defined. University studies on SOA and related topics, however, are still quite rare.

Already today I’m curious to see my list of abbreviations at the end (SOA, SOE, SOAD, ESOA, ESA, ESB, EAI, ERP, SAP, CAF, ……….).

I read that standardization of semantics (for example business objects and services) is helpful for achiving a valuable SOA. What about standardization of semantics for all those SOA-related terms?? At least for me THIS would be helpful. As it seems today, probably nobody can be assured that two people talking about SOA or an ESB are actually talking about the same.

I opened two categories - one called SOA and the other one SAP enterprise SOA. The first one is for SOA in general, the second one may contain more SAP related information.

(Anybody interested in my work may leave me a message or send me an e-mail and I will inform him when the thesis is available.)

Tags: Diploma Thesis, ESA, ESOA, SAP, SOA
Categories: SOA, SAP enterprise SOA
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