Confused about SOA

[Former Member]

Hi all

We recently upgraded to ECC 6 and are in our process to implement CRM and SCM systems too. The big picture we have is that to have SOA based system and I am into understanding how to integrate ECC, CRM, SCM, Portal, BW, XI and SOA. I am new to all these given above and am really confused about it. I understand XI can integrate all the systems and give data to Portal. Where does Enterprise service fit in?? What is the user interface for Enterprise service?? How to integrate ES and Portal??

I know it might be a very stupid question to ask for, but the more documents I read, the more I get confused.

Please help me get a clear picture of this whole thing..

Thanks in advance

Regards

Mui Kanva

[Former Member]

Hi Mui,

You are more looking at the technical solution.

Just understand these components.

Enterprise services are technically web services.

You can use enhancement packages and get the enterprise services for your ERP/SCM/CRM systems.

Once you have exposed your services in ERP/SCM/CRM system, you can consume it through using UI tools like-->

WebDynPro,Adobe Forms,Visual composer(in EP).

Once you have created it, you can make iviews of the above UIs to be show in the portal.

Enterprise Services donott have any front end but it provides services where you can exchange the data.

You can develop frontend using any UI technology which can consume web services.

XI can act both as a provider or consumer for web services. If required, XI can also be used . It can gives you benefit for interaces and messages from Enterprise Service Repository. No need to define it again.

Semantically Enterprise services are different from exposing RFC/BAPI as a web service but technically they are same.

The concept Of Enterprise Service is introduced to do more composition work using tools like CAF(Composite Application Framework). Frontend to CAF is again Portal.

CAF provides a process orchestration layer by defining a process which contains different steps. In each step use can consume diff enterprise service and for each step you can assign a different owner who would execute it.

So variety of options are available. You have to choose according to your requirement.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Piyush