Integrating Web Dynpro Apps into Sharepoint with Duet Enterprise

[Former Member]

As I understand, the objective of Duet (at the end of the day) is to provide Sharepoint a way to consume the business logic (BAPI's, RFC's) of SAP by exposing them as Webservices.

A sharepoint developer can then use these webservices in Sharepoint Designer and Visual Studio to build applications and other webparts and make them available in Sharepoint.

Chances are, any company thinking about implementing DUET Enterprise already owns a license to ECC....which includes the right to use all the SAP-delivered Web Dynpro applications, both WD4J and WD4A.

I don't think any company in there right mind would want to re-write the SAP-delivered Web Dynpro applications that provide the UI to run in a web-browser.

So does DUET Enterprise provide some mechanism to integrate the SAP Web Dynpro applications into Sharepoint??

From an application standpoint, why not just keep following SAP's strategy and build the web-enabled business suite applications using Web Dynpro ABAP (with Floorplan Manager) and expose these applications to Sharepoint?

What am I missing here?

[Former Member]

Hi Kelly,

the point here is native SharePoint integration. If your company does not have a SharePoint strategy then I absolutely agree with you. There are plenty of ways on how you can integrate WebDynpros, iViews, and other "SAP views" in SharePoint.

The "problem" with these integrations is always that it is not a native / low-level integration. It is just an iFrame within SharePoint that contains data coming from another system. This means that this data is isolated from any other functionality that is available in SharePoint.

Of course this can be enough for some usecases (maybe for all of yours ), but there are lots of companies who do want to leverage all of SharePoints (collaborative) functionalities. In this case Duet Enterprise does offer a way to integrate SAP objects into SharePoint on a "low-level". All objects that are integrated into SharePoint are then available as "real" SharePoint objects. You can work with them like with any other SharePoint object. You can even offline them using standard SharePoint functionalities. You can bring them to Outlook without any major development, ...

All this because we not only include an isolated iFrame in SharePoint, but really integrate the data.

Like I said: there are certainly usecases where this is not required and a simple iFrame is all that you need. However, we have seen in several projects now that there is also a requirement / need for a "deeper" integration.

Regards,

Holger.