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Integrating SAP applications with IBM WebSphere Portal software

2 Integrating SAP applications with IBM WebSphere Portal software

Executive summarySAP is often the largest software investment an organization will make. It is the backbone set of software applications that run businesses. Orders flow. People get hired. Goods and services are delivered.

At the same time, users across the value chain are demanding more from the web experience. They want personalized, relevant information. They want more social collaboration, more engagement and more interaction. These users not only need access to SAP applications, they need it in the context of a positive web experience.

By integrating best-in-class business applications from SAP with leading web experiences from IBM, your organization can compete more effectively and enhance the productivity of your workers. By improving the web experience of users, you can get more out of your SAP investment.

Contents2 Executive summary

2 Designing for the user, not the system

3 Planning the integration

4 Experiencing SAP with IBM WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP software

5 Creating with IBM Web Experience Factory

7 Leveraging two powerful forces for the user

Designing for the user, not the systemThe face of your organization is your website. It is the front door to your customers, the workplace for your employees and the junction for collaboration with business partners. An exceptional online experience can provide a competitive advantage by increasing satisfaction, productivity and agility. It can foster productivity and create community. The user experience needs to be relevant, personal, engaging and available from anywhere.

Behind the scenes, SAP is a critical element to the web experience. SAP delivers information on orders and shipments to customers. SAP provides employees with access to human resource information and organizational services. SAP provides sales teams with information on customers, products and pricing. The list goes on and on.

But SAP is only part of what users need. Depending on the task, users may also need web content, social content or access to other non-SAP applications. An exceptional web experience entails the ability to integrate SAP and non-SAP content and functionality. It makes sense to design your website from the perspective of the user experience. It helps to understand what customers, employees and partners want from their web experiencewhat they are trying to accomplishrather than just giving them out-of-the-box business application functionality. Integrating web-focused software tools like IBM WebSphere Portal software with your SAP business applications can be well worth the investment in meeting the needs of your users.

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Planning the integrationWhen integrating WebSphere Portal software with SAP business applications, it is important to understand that one size does not fit all. You need to ask important questions about your business environment:

Do you have non-SAP systems that need to be integrated? How do you manage your web content? What plans do you have for introducing social capabilities and

collaboration? What capabilities do you already have in place or planned?

Understanding your use cases is your first step in planning the best integration approach. Use cases can be casual or detailed. The majority of your employees and possibly customers will encounter casual use cases. These users need occasional access to information that originates from SAP. They need the information in the context of what they are doing and do not need to know or care that SAP is involved. For example, a casual use case could involve a sales person looking up customer information or pricing. It could be a customer who has been provided with visibility into their billing information. In both cases the requirement is to provide simplified access to SAP content in the context of their role and task at hand.

Detailed use cases involve a more complex need to interact with SAP information. For example, a sales person needs to create a new customer opportunity in the customer relationship

management system. It could be a pricing analyst gathering product and pricing data. It could be a manager performing salary planning for his team. In all of these examples, SAP provides an out-of-the-box user experience (delivered by SAP as business packages) that has been refined to meet the needs of each scenario.

IBM WebSphere Portal software

IBM WebSphere Portal software provides a single access point to web content and applications, while delivering highly engaging, personalized and differentiated web experiences for each user. In addition, it supports workflows, content management, simplified usability and administration, open standards, security, and scalability, all of which help your company achieve the following:

Offer relevant and highly personalized web experiences according to preferences, behaviors, locations and devices

Engage users through online communities, social interaction and collaboration

Provide consistency across multiple online channels Empower content owners to manage the creation and

delivery of rich content

4 Integrating SAP applications with IBM WebSphere Portal software

Different use cases may be better served by different types of integration, which can generally be broken down into two categories:

1. Create a new user experience that accesses SAP services. 2. Expose elements of the SAP user experience inside of

WebSphere Portal software.

The casual use cases are often best addressed by the first option of adding a new or simplified component that integrates with SAP at a service level. This enables users to access specific information in a manner that is most appropriate. It also lets users bypass any complex SAP screens that might detract from the usability of the experience that you are attempting to provide.

For detailed use cases it might make more sense to reuse and leverage the experience that SAP provides by exposing it in WebSphere Portal software. Ideally the user is unaware that they are working in a separate systemthat is, the user experience should feel like a natural part of the WebSphere Portal software. The experience should be integrated in the context of the users role and not require a separate SAP sign-on.

Experiencing SAP with IBM WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP softwareIBM and SAP have teamed up to provide new integration capabilities that enable SAP NetWeaver Portal to interoperate with IBM WebSphere Portal software. This integration capabil-ity is well suited for the use cases where it is highly desirable to reuse and extend the value of the SAP user experience elementsincluding SAP business packages.

Figure 1: SAP applications and IBM WebSphere Portal software integrate to improve the user experience.

SAP applications IBM WebSphere Portal CustomersEmployeesBusiness associates

MobileWebTablet

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Creating with IBM Web Experience FactoryIBM Web Experience Factory lets you easily create new experiences that access SAP services. Web Experience Factory delivers enterprise-ready, standards-based applications with rich, interactive interfaces that deliver exceptional web experiences. Developers can use Web Experience Factory to create rich and interactive applications. Web Experience Factory also provides flexible deployment options with support for the most popular smartphone devicesall from a single code base.

At the core of Web Experience Factory is a set of software automation components called builders. These builders capture design intelligence through easy-to-use, wizard-like user interfaces and then automate the creation of code. Included in Web Experience Factory are several builders that enable developers to rapidly and easily integrate with SAP. By leverag-ing these builders, companies can speed time to market for new SAP user experiences to address casual use case requirements.

IBM WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP software is a new feature of IBM WebSphere Portal software that integrates navigational structures and content from the SAP NetWeaver Portal into your IBM WebSphere Portal software. It is based on new public SAP application programming interfaces (APIs) and features introduced in SAP NetWeaver Portal 7.3

WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP software allows you to integrate SAP content in a way that makes it feels like a natural part of your WebSphere Portal software user experience by doing the following:

Providing a single sign-on from WebSphere Portal software to SAP NetWeaver Portal

Consuming the SAP NetWeaver Portal navigation structure for the user and role into WebSphere Portal software

Retrieving the content as specified in the WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP portlet

Content can be placed alongside of information from other systems, including web content and social capabilities from IBM. This new capability lets you reuse and repurpose your SAP investment by exposing it in the social business context of WebSphere Portal software.

From an experience perspective, users log in to WebSphere Portal software and appear to be working in a single integrated application. In reality, they are actually logged into two different systems and interacting directly with SAP, while working with SAP content. With this approach, everything behaves exactly as it would in SAP NetWeaver Portalbecause in reality users are working in SAP NetWeaver Portalbut do not necessarily realize it.

Figure 2: Determining how to approach SAP integration through use case comparison.

SAP

WebSpherePortal

SAP

WebSpherePortal

Detailed use caseExpose elements of the SAP user experienceinside of IBM WebSphere Portal software

Casual use caseCreate a new user experiencethat accesses SAP services

6 Integrating SAP applications with IBM WebSphere Portal software

SAP-related capabilities of Web Experience Factory also include the following:

Robust personalization and customization capabilities that allow users to modify any aspect of SAP applications, including look and feel, data, and application flow

Dynamic profiling that enables adaptive applications to display different data, allow different tasks and enable different administrative rights depending on the role or group of the user

Extensible Markup Language for Analysis (XMLA) support to quickly create powerful portlets that enable interaction with data in the SAP Business Information Warehouse

The automatic translation of SAP codes (country, currency and so on) into user-friendly text, select lists or radio buttons

A comprehensive object browser to quickly explore all Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs) within the SAP Business Object Repository

The ability to rapidly import data into SAP via batch recorded transactions

Direct integration with SAPIntegrating directly with SAP is quick and easy. Anyone with access to an SAP server can browse and directly access SAP Remote Function Call (RFC)enabled BAPIs. New user experiences can be rapidly created and deployed to meet changing business requirements.

Web Experience Factory builders work with SAP Java Connector to access public or custom BAPIs. The Web Experience Factory builders provide full support for the

creation, reading, update and deletion of SAP information. The SAP BAPI integration model acts as a service provider to one or more user experience models. This offers flexibility because you can reuse the data as you refine the user experience and build new ones. By separating SAP integration from the user experience you also buffer the user experience from any changes on the back-end SAP system.

The SAP view and form builder work with the BAPI builders to provide ready-made input and output experiences that can serve as a basis for further customization. User credentials can be passed to SAP through Web Experience Factory builders, allowing you to create a custom experience that accesses SAP without the user being aware of it or having to authenticate with SAP.

Web services Another approach is the use of web services through an enterprise service bus to connect to SAP. This approach is common with service-oriented architecture. The service bus acts as a middleware buffer that provides access to SAP and non-SAP systems through web services. It simplifies the integration to SAP by providing a single connection that is shared and managed through the service bus. This approach requires more infrastructure work to set up than integrating directly with SAP but can provide significant benefits longer term with the agility gained with the service-oriented architecture.

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Web Experience Factory is used to create web service models that connect to the service bus for interaction with SAP. This is done in place of the BAPI integration models that are used with a direct integration approach. The user experience models you build with Web Experience Factory can remain the same. Changes to the back end are buffered through this web services layer, which provides flexibility to changing release level and updates to SAPhelping ensure that your new web experiences continue to work.

SAP NetWeaver GatewaySAP NetWeaver Gateway can also be used with Web Experience Factory. NetWeaver Gateway offers connectivity to SAP applications without the need for specific SAP knowledge through representational state transfer (REST). With Web Experience Factory, developers can build REST integration models that access SAP through NetWeaver Gateway without having detailed knowledge of RFCs and BAPIs.

REST is an inherently lightweight and intuitive environment that allows developers to create, update, query and manage information of REST-enabled applications (such as SAP) from their own custom applications. The simplicity in the API comes from the fact that the REST API is HTTP-based, allowing you to easily make requests to SAP through a simple and straightforward URL using POST, PUT and DELETE methods.

This new approach promises a simple and fast way for creation of user experiences to address casual use cases. It leverages the latest REST builders in Web Experience Factory with SAPs strategic focus for enabling easier access to SAP from third-party products and devices.

Leveraging two powerful forces for the userIBM provides a comprehensive set of integration capabilities for combining the exceptional web experience capabilities of WebSphere Portal software with market-leading business applications from SAP. Looking at the integration of capabilities from the perspective of the user can help organizations better utilize SAP business packages, while leveraging the latest in Web 2.0 and mobile technologies. Together, we can help your organization deliver engaging, exceptional and differentiated online experiences to your customers, employees and associates, which can help you meet business objectives.

For more informationTo learn more about IBM WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP software, IBM Web Experience Factory and related solutions, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/websphere/portal

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