SAP WORLDBegining of New ERP World

Thanks to a free iPhone app, you can now use your smartphone to access and process data from SAP Business Suite and SAP CRM. The app is aimed primarily at sales reps and field service employees who work for large companies.

Customer Data, Activities, Leads and Analysis (photo: Frank Völkel)

Nowadays, all respectable sales reps and field service employees are expected to have key corporate and customer data at their fingertips in real time. This enables them, for example, to check important facts before a sales meeting and instantly update figures in the system while on-site with the customer. Long gone are the days when documents were faxed to company headquarters from the hotel lobby and data was keyed into the system manually. The Mobile Sales & Workflow app from the Düsseldorf, Germany-based company Sybase forms the bridge between the iPhone as CRM client and the SAP Business Suite software.

The Mobile Sales & Workflow application was quite some time in the making. At the CRM-expo in the German city of Nuremberg last year (see the article CRM-expo 2009: Mobile Customers), rumors began circulating about the product and a select few actually saw the version for the iPhone.

The beta version of the business app was greeted with much more enthusiasm on the iPhone than it was on RIM’s BlackBerry Bold, with Apple winning out particularly in terms of speed and graphics (see the article iPhone or BlackBerry – Comparing the Future of CRM).

From the customer perspective, it’s now possible to access information from SAP Business Suite and the SAP Customer Relationship Management application (SAP CRM) and then update it. Almost playfully, the user zips through customer data, checks the status of reports, and works with predefined workflows. Now there’s no need to lug around an Internet-enabled notebook.

All you need is an iPhone with firmware 3.x and the related client, which can be downloaded free of charge as an app from the iTunes Store (Sybase Mobile Sales & Workflow – direct link) and takes up 7.5 MB in the smartphone’s memory. After installation, the software automatically selects the local language, with English, German, and French currently on offer. To find your way around and get started, demo data is available on the SAP server. To hook up your company server and SAP system, you’ll need the Sybase Unwired Platform.

Data from Business Suite 7 on the iPhone with Sybase Mobile Sales

Contacts and Tasks

Charts

 

Source : SAPINFO

With providers releasing more and more apps for iPhone or BlackBerry to supplement customers’ business software, the SAP NetWeaver Mobile platform serves as the interface between these mini-programs and SAP systems. Here, we introduce you to the latest version (7.1).

SAP NetWeaver Mobile: The link between partner software and SAP systems. (graphic: grasundsterne)

A few years ago, Apple showed the world how small programs known as “apps” can enable users to run software while on the move. Apps have since become commonplace in everyday business. For SAP partners, this a prime opportunity to program new, industry-specific software that integrates with existing SAP systems and makes it possible for employees to access them with their mobile devices. In the articles “The Best Business Apps for Your iPad” and “Best Business Apps for iPhone,” we told you about the mobile software currently leading the pack.

This time, we take a look at the link between partner software and SAP systems: SAP NetWeaver Mobile 7.1.

Just like SAP NetWeaver, SAP NetWeaver Mobile is a technology platform on which SAP software and third-party programs run. Whether it’s SAP ERP, SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), or SAP Business One, SAP software is based on the programming language ABAP. SAP NetWeaver Mobile, meanwhile, facilitates the integration of additional industry-specific applications written in C++, Java, or other languages. It also enables users to merge business information from various databases.

The concept behind SAP NetWeaver Mobile

SAP NetWeaver Mobile replicates data from the back end, syncs it to mobile devices, and handles the corresponding processing.

The platform’s Data Orchestration Engine (DOE) directs data and transactions to users based on individual rules, which ensures that it only distributes needed information and transmits changes in the order they are made. When an employee is assigned a new customer, for example, all of the required information is automatically sent to his or her mobile device.

In addition, DOE automatically syncs changes to the devices of employees in the field every time they log in. Rather than transmitting complete data records, the engine only transfers new information – an updated phone number, for instance – which saves time.

Since the data is made available on a middleware server, customers can skip buying additional hardware. From PDFs and Microsoft Word documents to image files, the server sends along the latest data every time users synchronize their mobile software. Technicians on their way to a repair assignment, for example, can access their service manuals whenever needed.

NetWeaver Gateway is positioned between end-user devices and the back end (screenshot: SAP) 

Structure and functions

Since SAP NetWeaver Gateway is designed to support rapid development and ease of use, every application created with it should focus on a clearly defined business requirement while integrating the corresponding business data and processes. SAP’s technology generates the objects required based on aggregated data drawn from various SAP systems and other sources, and transfers information between user and SAP applications using a REST-based standard.

In addition to REST services, SAP NetWeaver Gateway utilizes Atom and OData 2.0 as its transfer protocols, which also support SAP-specific notes. The technology’s model repository makes it possible to save, search for, and call up analysis models following their creation, and a push channel supplies developers’ apps with information from SAP systems, which can then be transferred, for example, to an e-mail client.

Meanwhile, SAP has set its sights on establishing an ecosystem with enough expertise to meet its customers’ needs from day one. To this end, the company has joined forces with Capgemini, CompriseIT, intelligence, and Software AG to found the Design Partner Council.

An independent life cycle

To keep the respective life cycles of apps and the corresponding back end separate, SAP NetWeaver Gateway also includes an “abstraction layer.” As such, updates, upgrades, and new releases on one side won’t require adjustments on the other. Since the technology is an ABAP platform add-on, most SAP Business Suite customers – as well as those on SAP R/3 4.6C and later – will be able to use it.

Development made easy

As an additional advantage, those who develop their apps with SAP NetWeaver Gateway will be able to use more or less whatever integrated development environment they choose. SAP also plans to offer optional plugins that will make it easier to incorporate Visual Studio, Apple’s Xcode, and Eclipse. In addition to Xcode, the technology is to support Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry devices, as well as the Web frameworks .NET, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and ASP.NET. It also includes an object- and screen-based generator that will enable developers to reuse models they program just once on other end-user devices – without further coding. Preconfigured models, meanwhile, will map objects from SAP ERP and SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), and runtime services will support IT engineers with regard to security, monitoring, and administration.

Source : SAPINFO

The route to the app (screenshot: SAP) 

REST Architecture

REST – or Representational State Transfer – used with Gateway is a software architecture concept for implementing Web services. The biggest REST application is the World Wide Web itself; and Amazon, Twitter, and Google apps are also built using it. The architecture is based exclusively on four commands: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. Compared with the network protocol SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), this simple structure ensures ease of use when working with content.

RESTful Web services can receive data as HTML or XML versions. In the case of Gateway, the Atom is used as standard. This comprises the Atom Publishing Protocol– or AtomPub for short – and the Atom Syndication Format (ASF). ASF is an XML language used for Web feeds similar to RSS and enables platform-independent exchange of information. This isn’t sufficient for business apps, because the content changes constantly, so AtomPub is used to process incoming data. The data finds its way to the developer using SAP’s data protocol, which is based on OData and can read JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) as well as Atom.

Source : SAPINFO

We’re used to seeing IT industry megavendors such as SAP augment their solutions with web 2.0 technology from smaller vendors, but now one of the leading enterprise 2.0 companies is turning to SAP for a cloud computing offers to extend new capabilities to customers.
At the Enterprise 2.0 2009 event in Boston, Jive and SAP announced that Jive is going to be a reseller of SAP’s on-demand BI solutions, providing “social BI” to their customers.
SAP has long been a customer of Jive Software’s Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform, notably to power the forums on the SAP Development Network, and SAP’s Collaboration Workspace, and a few years ago SAP signed an OEM agreement to include Jive Forums as a standard part of the SAP NetWeaver portal application.
This announcement is a clear sign of the growing maturity of the enterprise 2.0 market, in two different ways.
First, it’s the first concrete results of SAP’s increased focus on the web 2.0 market, and in particular the investment in the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio of products, designed to transform the work of “business users” in the same way that ERP has transformed operational processes.
SAP BusinessObjects was one of the early pioneers in the on-demand business intelligence market, with a flexible platform that provides the best of both worlds: customers can use the same technology platform in a mix of on-demand or on-premise configurations, and move smoothly between the two. SAP’s agreement to partner with Jive is non-exclusive: the on-demand BI software is already used within other partner solutions including Oco.
Second, it shows that enterprise 2.0 solutions are real, and providing value in organizations. Jive’s 3,000 customers include many large organizations, that have been gathering valuable data about how companies collaborate internally and engage with customers and partners externally. As with any successful business process, they now want to examine and optimize that process, and mine that data with best-of-breed business intelligence tools.
These two trends were echoed by Susan Scrupski of ITSInsider, in her post And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event:
“This new venture, however, marks a clear initiative by SAP to (finally) take social software seriously, and likewise, it provides a grownup capability for a social software platform like Jive to deliver some clear business benefit.”
I believe business intelligence is an essential part of any successful enterprise 2.0 initiative, in order to:
Provide statistics on usage trends. Business intelligence helps proactively identify any technical or social roadblocks to effective deployment of collaboration tools, answering questions such as:
When are the peaks and troughs of user activity? What causes them?
Who has access to the system but is not using it?
Which users have recently stopped using the system? Do they share any common characteristics?
Are there any regular occasions where particular groups don’t use the system? Why?
Prove the ROI. Business intelligence functionality will help provide the data required to prove to skeptics of the value of collaboration and social computing inside organizations.
Are users of the system more likely to get better (or worse) employee evaluations or bonuses?
What’s the correlation between any groups of identified “top performers” and system usage?
Do sales people who use the system achieve quota faster than sales people that do not?
Does using the system replace other types of internal information dissemination, such as attending internal web seminars, or does it complement it?
Is there any correlation between system use and employee or customer satisfaction?
Are customers that engage in collaboration more or less profitable?
Optimize social relationships. If enterprise 2.0 software generates return on investment, it follows that it makes sense to try and optimize its use. Business intelligence systems can help decide where the network of relationships between employees, customers, and partners can be improved:
Are there certain key “connectors” that provide a valuable service, but are not being recognized as such within the organization?
Are there any groups of people that collaborate among themselves, but not with the rest of the organization? (e.g. bosses that frown on “their team” working with other departments)
Do similar groups (such as regional sales offices) have different patterns of relationships? Why?
Are there people that seem to be a negative influence on relationships within the organization? (e.g. detecting “bad bosses”
Did the new bonus or incentive system we just introduced stop people collaborating?

Analyzing sentiments. Collaboration technology generates a lot of textual information that can be analyzed using technology such as SAP BusinessObjects’ Text Analytics, for analyzing the sentiment of customers, partners, and employees, about products, processes, or the collaboration system itself.
Note that in every case, it’s not enough to have information just from the collaboration system – it must be combined with information from other key financial and HR systems in order to get a full view of what is happening. This means that organizations must have a strategic approach to implementing business intelligence across the organization.

Source: sapweb20.com

This used to be a quick, irreverent overview of the brand-new cloud-based, software-as-a-service ERP offering from SAP, featuring the graphics you can see above.

The Mini SAP Web Application Server 6.10 is a full SAP basis system, but without application areas such as HR, SD, MM etc. Because it does have standard SAP development tools such as the development workbench(SE80) you are able to develop and test new custom functionality including reports, transactions, Business Server Pages and ABAP Objects on your home PC. It has Full ABAP Stack functionality of mySAP Technology SAP Server, GUI and SAPDB database.

In the present era, where companies are struggling to unite various heterogeneous environments in their organizations and maintain a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) NetWeaver comes as a solution to all their problems. SAP NetWeaver is the latest advancement in the mySAP Technology, which was developed as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) shell that accepts standard comments, literally as they are spoken, by domain experts.

Another unique feature of NetWeaver™ that makes it stand out amongst other software technologies is its modularity. The knowledge engineer can more easily create “digestible chunks” of modules or sub-dependency networks, which help to keep the overarching dependency network from becoming potentially incomprehensible because of apparent complexity. This text is aimed at explaining SAP NetWeaver architecture and its interoperability with Microsoft.NET and IBM WebSphere. In addition it aims at bringing out all the advantages that are associated with SAP NetWeaver.

Net Weaver in simple words is an application and Integration platform in which Web Services play a major role and which is open for Non-SAP applications and platform. It is used by organizations to improve productivity and enhance efficiency by making all the resources that are available in an enterprise to work collectively. The SAP customers to bring heterogeneous environments at one platform use SAP NetWeaver. In addition, it enables customers to use the already existing systems without putting in much investment. Further in the near future, the various corporate sectors and Organizations have to take a decision for some common platform; could be Microsoft .NET, IBM Websphere or SAP NetWeaver. Irrespective of the choice that they make, SAP NetWeaver is the one that integrates with all the three technologies.
SAP NetWeaver attains the process of integration by integrating all the available heterogeneous resources of the existing system and unifying them into a homogeneous form. This integrated information forms the basis of total, comprehendible, focused solution as desired in an enterprise.

Source:
http://www.thespot4sap.com/articles/SAP_Netweaver_Introduction.asp

Data Extraction to flat files can be made in different ways but  extraction of data in Debug mode using EXIT_SAPLRSAP_001 sap exit is more efficient,less consumption of memory and time.

The Common Challenge that we go through in RSA3 is Memory and the Amount of data inside the Database 

For example lets take 0FI_GL_4,the table used are BSEG and BKPF .This Datasource Generally contains huge Data and when you execute the datasource , the system takes a lot of time and at the end it generates short Dump. the Dump is as shown below.

In order to over come the above challenge,  lets start up with Extraction using Debug Mode.

Detailed Steps:
Please follow the below steps…

Step1 

Log on to the ECC system . go to Transaction Code SE37 give the Function module name EXIT_SAPLRSAP_001.

Get into the function module and set a break point on the INCLUDE ZXRSAU01 Structure and exit from the screen.

Step2

Now Go to the Transaction Code RSA3.

”

Give the Datasource name 0FI_GL_4.

Increase the Data Records / Calls to 999999 and Display Extr. Calls to 1 because we can see all the data in single Data packet and can easily extract all the data to a flat file. 

Now press Execute (F8) since we have  already set a break point ,after a Few minutes the screen gets into the Debug mode and stops. At this time the data is ready for extraction inside the internal table C_T_DATA in a single Packet.

Step3

In the ABAP Debugger Screen, Type C_T_DATA[] as show bellow and press Enter.

Now it will show the total number records inside the datasource , here in this example the total number of records is 815572.

Step4

Double Click on the C_T_DATA, now we can view the entire data of the Datasource as shown below.

In case if the number of records are more than 999999 we should increase the DisplayExtr Calls to 2. and extraction is done in two different packets one after the other.

we have captured whole Data inside the internal table C_T_DATA,from the internal table we need to export it to a flat file using the icon save as excel sheet as shown in the figure below.

Step5 

Press Continue and save the data in a difftent name, here the name of the file is 0FI_GL_04_All_Data.

The system takes some time to get saved inside the local machine. wait for few minutes and then open the file which is saved in the local system.

The Output looks as below Shown.

Note : This extraction is advisable to install Microsoft Office 2007

Because in Microsoft 2003 the  Number of rows is  Limited to 65536

But in Office 2007 Excel supports more than 1 Million Records

Source:  Santhosh Nagaraj   SAP BI Consultant , Quinnox Consultancy Services , Bangalore

 SAP has purchased a cloud computing company, Coghead, a “next generation platform for building web applications.”

The vendor was struggling in the current economic climate, SAP Ventures had previously invested in the company, and the company already offered integration with SAP environments. “SAP is one of the premier tech companies in the world and we’re really happy this transaction took place,” said Coghead CEO Paul McNamara in an interview with InformationWeek.

Coghead will cease operations, and SAP will not be supporting existing customers, but will integrate many of Coghead’s employees.

A Platform For the Future

Coghead provided a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that allowed its customers to build applications over the web, using an Adobe-Flex-based environment, hosted in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. It called the platform “the fastest and most efficient way to build and deliver applications in the cloud.”

As TechCrunch said in their early coverage of Coghead: “Every company in Silicon Valley wants to become a platform for other companies to build cool stuff on top of.” Customers had praised the platform for its flexibility, using language typically not associated with more mature application development environments from SAP and others:

• Coghead works the way we work “We need applications that work the way we work, not the way a software vendor thinks we should work. Packaged software often ends up delivering more than we need in some areas and less than we want in others.” - Paul Fu, VP and CIO, Morrison Express
• Coghead was the difference “Coghead wasn’t just the difference between creating my app directly myself or doing it by remote control through I.T. It was the difference between getting it done and launching it instead of watching the grass grow while it percolated high enough for I.T. to attack.” - Ron Dion, Housing Authority of the County of Alameda (HACA)
• A revolution in business process applications “From the moment we made the leap to using Coghead actions, we knew that a revolution in business process applications was right in front of us.” - Govind Davis, MCF Tech
• Say hello to software that works the way you need it to “Coghead provides a unique way to look at software, one that allows for total user control in design and functionality of your application. Say goodbye to one size fits all, say hello to software that works the way you need it to.” – Mark Palmer, PeopleWerx
• Coghead is going to change the way developers create applications “I believe Coghead is going to change the way developers create applications and how business is done in the software application industry … The open architecture and flexible platform allows developers, consultants and programmers to build applications as they want it … I think there are a number of companies in this space but Coghead is a leader in this aspect.” – Derek Tay, Consultant, Photographer, Derek Tay Productions

Coghead Highlights

Example products page built with Coghead	Example opportunities screen
Drag and drop forms editing	Widgets, Data Structures & Functions
Create Workflows using the Action Editor	Custom Alerts with Variables

For more details on the Coghead platform and features:

• Platform – In-depth look at the Coghead technology stack
• Features – Comprehensive list of product features and capabilities
• Screenshots – Visual tour of the Coghead user interface, editors and admin tools

The SAP Advantage: Cloud Computing with Enterprise Backup

The Coghead platform is now part of SAP’s product portfolio. According to Vishal Sikka, SAP CTO:

“Coghead was a true pioneer in platform-as-a-service and cloud computing in general. Coghead’s IP and expertise will help SAP in various aspects of our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology and application initiatives. I have always seen delivery of application capabilities from cloud as a key component of the total capability we need to deliver to our customers.”

 There has been no formal announcement as to how or whether SAP will be selling the product in the future. The existing Coghead service will continue through April, and customers are scrambling to download their data and find alternatives for their hosted applications.

Lack of long-term security is one of the often-cited dangers of cloud computing. As a prescient commentator said in 2007, as a comment to a Techcrunch note on Coghill: “I build a business on coghead then coghead goes bust – guess what happens to my business?”

SAP is now in the position of being able to combine flexible, easy cloud application development with the kind of robust backup expected from mature application vendors – it will be interesting to see what it does with this opportunity

Source : SAP WEB 2.0