How was the pre-XI world at SAP??

[Former Member]

Hi

I am wondering which integrtion technologies were present in the SAP world before the emergence of SAP XI?

I heared about technologies like, ALE and BC (Business Connector)..

Could you name those technologies and describe their disadvantages shortly??

Thanks

Regards,

Go:khan

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

ALE and IDoc are part of the current XI strategy. XI is a middleware software that orchestrates the data flow (workflow) of data between heterogeneous systems. XI makes heavy use of IDocs as well. There are two ways to communicate with an SAP installation,synchronously and asynchronously. The synchronous technology uses RFC calls into the system, and the asynchronous one sends IDocs to R/3. When you do an RFC call, you will immediately receive the result of the transaction, but you will also have to cope with the result. If the transaction failed, the calling system (may it be XI) will have to deal with it. With IDocs you have a simple message queue that stores every received document, along with the processing state, and lets you reprocess the received document from within R/3 when there is a failure.

Thanks and Regards

Jishi

[Former Member]

Hi,

There are different interfaceing technologies available in SAP.

1. Communication using ALE, EDI, IDoc, BAPI and RFC are the most famous one. This is because it is easy maintain, configure and monitor. You get details documentation and overview on the following site.

http://www.sapgenie.com

2. Othet option to connect the SAP and othet system is JCo communication or .Net connector which the development require is more and not easy to monitor.

3. Business connector and the different third party connector which is also good way to coonect and communicate using XML standard.

All this techonolies are good but the disadvantage is point to point communication and not so eay to maintain over the period of time. The advantage of XI is single point of development, easy to monitor.

Thanks,

Prateek