SAP PI as Partner Gateway to communicate to External Trading Partners

[Former Member]

We are looking to see if SAP PI can act as a gateway to our trading partners as well as a complete integration platform to perform the following activities.

1. Receive / Send Traditional EDI documents to our trading partners.

2. Receive / Send Rosettant documents to our trading partners

3. Maintain partners certiticates

4. Message Tracking.

We understand the following adaptors need to be used for communication

1. Use Seeburger Adaptors to communicate with VAN AS2 trading partners

2. Use SAP Rosettanet Adaptor to communicate with other trading partners

But would like to understand if any of you have used SAP PI as their complete integration platform to communicate internally to other third party applications inside the company , and also communicate outside to the trading partners.

Any help or input would be very helpful , currently we use IBM as our partner gateway to communicate to our trading partners and we are looking to see if SAP PI can do this for us instead.

Thanks for all of your inputs.

Regards,

Madhu

[Shabarish_Nair]

We are looking to see if SAP PI can act as a gateway to our trading partners as well as a complete integration platform to perform the following activities. 
> 
> 1. Receive / Send Traditional EDI  documents to our trading partners.
> 2. Receive / Send Rosettant documents to our trading partners
> 3. Maintain partners certiticates
> 4. Message Tracking.

Seeburger adapter will provide you all capabilities when it comes to EDI documents and transfer protocols like AS2 and VAN

RNIF adapters and SAP standard content can be used to enable Rosettanet scenarios.

/people/shabarish.vijayakumar/blog/2008/01/09/rosettanet-rnif-xi--breaking-the-code

> 
> We understand the following adaptors need to be used for communication
> 
> 1.  Use Seeburger Adaptors to communicate with VAN AS2 trading partners
> 2. Use SAP Rosettanet Adaptor to communicate with other trading partners
> 
> But would like to understand if any of you have used SAP PI as their complete integration platform to communicate internally to other third party applications inside the company , and also communicate outside to the trading partners.
> 
> Any help or input would be very helpful , currently we use IBM as our partner gateway to communicate to our trading partners and we are looking  to see if SAP PI can do this for us instead.
> 
> Thanks for all of your inputs.
> 
> Regards,
> Madhu

I personally know of customer who have replaced their existing framework with SAP PI implementing exact requirements as you have mentioned. There are B2B solution support in PI that will enable you to communicate with external parties.

[Former Member]

Hi Madhu,

It is definitely possible to use SAP PI as the integration platform for A2A and B2B. I've been involved in many projects, where SAP PI has been used as the main integration platform between SAP and different types of applications and partners.

Depending on your scenarios and message volumes you could think of maybe separating your A2A integrations from your B2B integrations - either by installing two complete SAP PI systems or by utilizing decentralised adapter engines.

Message tracking and certificate handling is built-in functionality of SAP PI and SAP WAS.

One thing to note about message tracking, though, is that SAP PI as standard does not contain EDIFACT-centric (Interchange Control Reference, Interchange Sender, Interchange Receiver etc.) tracking of messages, but this can be achieved by using Seeburger Message Tracking.

Best regards,

Jacob

[Former Member]

Jacob,

Thanks for your reply.

Can you point me to some documentation to understand where the trading partner setup will be done.

We are currently comparing PI to a IBM Partner Gateway which gives us trading partner maintainence and document definition maintainence and we do not understand in PI where the trading partners will be created and where their certificates will be uploaded.

Can you provide some insight on that.

Where are new trading partner is setup ?

Where do i install certificates ?

Are Trading Partners called Party in PI ?

Can i search documents based on Trading Partner ?

Can I resend documents ? If so where will i be resending them from ? RWB ? SXMB_MONI ?

Appreciate your help

Regards,

Madhu

[Former Member]

Hi Madhu,

Unfortunately I don't have access to the Seeburger documentation anymore as my current company is not using Seeburger for EDI integrations.

However, I found this very good blog-series by Prateek, which goes through the basics of Seeburger configuration and tools.

/people/prateek.srivastava3/blog/2009/08/01/seeburger--part-1--the-basics

Where are new trading partner is setup ?

Trading partners are setup in Integration Directory, Seeburger Addressbooks and Seeburger Message Splitter.

Where do i install certificates ?

As far as I remember certificates are installed in J2EE Key store, but this only applies for the technical communication. If you need digital signatures for documents it is handled in Seeburger Digital Signature

Are Trading Partners called Party in PI ?

Yes.

Can i search documents based on Trading Partner ?

Yes. In PI you can search for Trading Partner based on Party and Interchange Sender/Receiver in Seeburger Message Tracking

Can I resend documents ? If so where will i be resending them from ? RWB ? SXMB_MONI ?

Yes. Depending on where a potential error might have occured you can resend messages from RWB (both from integration engine and adapter engine), Seeburger Message Monitor or if everything else fails you can resend the document from the source system.

Best regards,

Jacob