SOA-Thesis Published
April 6, 2007
Woods, D.; Mattern, T.: Enterprise SOA : Designing IT for Business Innovation. First Edition, Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2006
Although not published through SAP Press and not visible otherwise from the front cover, one clearly has to state that this is a book which is discussing the SAP view on enterprise SOA / ESA. Dan Woods was already author of the first book about Enterprise Services Architecture published in 2003 (German version 2004: Enterprise Services Architecture). For this new book now he gets support from Thomas Mattern, which is the Solution Marketing Manager for ESA at SAP. This might be a little hint.
Short assessment: If you are already using SAP technology or if you are thinking about using it in the future, this book will give an overview and serve as a good entry point to get informed about new visions, concepts and products at SAP. If you just want to get informed about SOA and already know that you won’t implement your SOA using SAP technology, better keep on searching as large parts of the book are product focused.
Chapters of the book:
- ESA in the World of Information Technology
- The Business Case for ESA
- Evolving Toward ESA
- ESA Fundamentals: Learning to Think ESA
- The Structure of ESA
- The Enterprise Services Community
- Creating a Roadmap with the ESA Adoption Program
- The Enterprise Services Repository and the Enterprise Services Inventory
- Project Mendocino: A Product Based on Consuming Enterprise Services
- ESA at Work: Examples from the Field
- SAP xApps Composite Applications for Analytics
- The Architecture and Development Tools of Composite Applications
- Supporting Composite Applications
- Web Services Basics
- Creating Enterprise Services in ABAP
- Creating and Consuming Services in Java
- ESA and IT Governance
- ESA Life Cycle Management and Operations
- ESA Security
- Standards and ESA
Do expect:
- answers to questions you might have
- practical guidance supported by screenshots and images
- a business-oriented introduction why enterprise SOA is important
- to get an overview of SAP visions, applications, tools, consulting services and community initiatives in the context of SOA
Don’t expect:
- good structuring
- precise definitions of terms, concepts and technologies
- academical examination of SOA
- vendor-neutrality
Enterprise SOA with SAP NetWeaver 2004s
October 18, 2006
Enterprise SOA currently is a very important topic at SAP and most SAP presentations you get to see (for example at SAPTeched which was starting today in Amsterdam) will probably include information and graphics about enterprise SOA, NetWeaver and the Business Process Platform. However, I made the experience that those graphics are either very simple (don’t provide information about included components, tool names etc.) or they focus on a specific application like Application Server, Exchange Infrastructure or Composite Application Framework. Thus for me it was very hard at the beginning to understand the coherences and differences between NetWeaver applications and to get an overall understanding what enterprise SOA means in terms of SAP tools and applications. Therefore I created my own picture which I extended over time. Of course it does not include all details but the chosen granualirity was a good basis for the discussions I had in the area of enterprise SOA. So here it is, maybe it’s of some help for you as well:
Enterprise SOA with SAP NetWeaver 2004s
The graphic might be a bit complex when you first see it but this is how the application reality in the context of enterprise SOA is. For the most important applications you find the respective development tools at the side in a box with striped background. The graphic also gives an orientation which applications are on the same layer. You see for example that web services can be created with XI or CAF Core, processes with ccBPM or Guided Procedures. So it might be interesting to explore the differences.
In case the graphic is helpful or you have an idea how to improve it, you can of course leave me a comment.
Why-To Improve SAP Guides
September 11, 2006
SAP Help NetWeaver 04s Navigation Structure
September 7, 2006
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.
