Integration is a long-standing requirement satisfied by enterprise portals. Over the past 10 years, integrating SAP and IBM WebSphere Portal has been top of mind for a lot of people. Marty Lechleider spoke at the IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference on the offerings IBM has for integration.
Both IBM and SAP have multiple products, so Marty put them into buckets and described which products integrate with which products in each bucket. In fact, SAP has a portal and IBM has a portal. Some SAP functions are naturally better displayed using SAP’s portal. Often, however, we need to integrate SAP data with other content, which is where IBM WebSphere Portal really shines.
The technologies used to integrate the various systems include:
- WSRP
- iFrames
- Web Services
- REST
- RFC / BAPIs
Each of these technologies work great for parts of SAP integration, but each can have its pitfull.
WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP is a package from IBM that is available from the Solutions Catalogue. This software works with NetWeaver v7.3 to provide integration at the User Interface level. This tool exposes SAP User Experience Elements using SAP iFrames specially built by SAP. Three key functions are provided by the Integrator for SAP:
- Single Sign On (SSO) using SAML 20
- Navigation Integration – navigation through SAP is dynamic and reflected in WebSphere Portal directly.
- Content Integration – single pieces of SAP Portal content (URL Addressable) is displayed directly in portal. For these content pages, SAP provides the content without left side or top level navigation. This can include iViews, Object Views and more.
SAP has a whitepaper about this integration here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-26539
IBM’s Web Application Bridge is another technology that can be used to integrate SAP and IBM Portal. In this case, you have to implement SSO separately, but it will expose SAP screens in WebSphere Portal.
IBM Web Experience Factory and IBM Forms Experience Builder are used for services level integrations.
Web Experience Factory (WEF) has several pre-built SAP connectors for:
- SAP View & Form
- SAP BW Data Access
- SAP Function Call
- SAP Info Type
- SAP Batch Input
- SAP Help Values
Using these connectors, you can easily access the SAP data and present it in a new way using WEF. Since WEF is a rapid development environment, you can quickly deploy custom SAP applications on WebSphere Portal that exactly meets your needs.
SAP now provides a NetWeaver Gateway that simplifies access to SAP BAPIs. The Gateway exposes REST services that are easily accessed by both WEF and IBM Forms Experience Builder. You don’t need NetWeaver Portal on the SAP side to take advantage of NetWeaver Gateway.
IBM Forms Experience Builder (FEB) allows you to use SAP services (WSDLs) to easily build custom forms integrated with SAP data. If you don’t like some of the SAP UI or want to limit what a user might see on your portal, FEB is another great way to build a good looking UI in WebSphere Portal pulling data from SAP. FEB will also let you update SAP data through the SAP services interface. Marty gave a fine demo of using FEB to build an employee raise application that pulls data from SAP, keeps track of a workflow, displays the application on WebSphere Portal alongside some social data.
And all this works with Mobile too!
