what is the use of ALE and EDI in IDOC process

hi gurus,

in which scenario we use ALE/EDI?

actually IDOC stands for Intermediate document which stores the data and sendng outbound and receiving inbound.

i am not understanding onething here what is the necessity to use ALE/EDI?

could you please tell me?

Regards,

SOMIU.

SAP Managed Tags:
SD (Sales and Distribution)

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Application Link Enabling

Used mostly for SAP to SAP communication. Used in Distributed servers system. E.g. Say a Company has a central server at its head office and local servers at its branches. ALE is used to keep all the servers synchronized.

Electronic Data Interchange: Used Mostly for communication between any 2 systems on different networks. E.g. Communication by a company with its Suppliers and Customers.

ALE is an SAP terminology. ALE is integrated with SAP product. EDI is a technology in itself. It has its own set of standards. SAP supports EDI through IDOCs.

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Hi Somu,

Purpose

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Application Link Enabling (ALE) are used for exchanging business data between different systems.

For both these forms of communication, you require the IDoc Interface. The IDoc interface is made up of the definition of a data structure and the processing logic of this data structure. The data structure is the IDoc. The IDoc is the general exchange format of the communicating systems. IDocs can be sent using different methods (for example, Structure linkRFC or as a file).

Application Link Enabling (ALE)

You distribute data using ALE if you want to communicate from one system to one or more other (mostly internal) systems. ALE transfers data in IDoc format and uses the methods of tRFC for data transfer.

· ALE enables the integration of business processes across several SAP or non-SAP systems.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

You use EDI if you want to exchange business application documents with an (external) partner system (for example, a customer or vendor). The SAP system sends EDI messages in IDoc format to an EDI subsystem, where they are converted to a universal EDI standard (UN/EDIFACT or ANSI/X12). This enables communication with non-SAP systems.

· By definition, two partners are involved in the process in an EDI application scenario: The sender and the recipient of an EDI message.

Thanks&Regards,

Phani.

Points if Helpful.