IBM Software

Integrating SAP applications with

IBM WebSphere Portal software
2 Integrating SAP applications with IBM WebSphere Portal software
Executive summary
SAP is often the largest software investment an organization will
make. It is the backbone set of software applications that run
businesses. Orders ow. 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 efectively and enhance the productivity of your
workers. By improving the web experience of users, you can get
more out of your SAP investment.
Contents
2 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 system
The 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.
3 IBM Software
Planning the integration
When integrating WebSphere Portal software with SAP
business applications, it is important to understand that one size
does not t 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 rst 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 simplied 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 rened 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 workows, content
management, simplied 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
Diferent use cases may be better served by diferent 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 rst
option of adding a new or simplied component that integrates
with SAP at a service level. This enables users to access
specic 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 software
IBM 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 Customers
Employees
Business associates
Mobile
Web
Tablet
5 IBM Software
Creating with IBM Web Experience
Factory
IBM 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
exible 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 specied 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 diferent
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
WebSphere
Portal
SAP
WebSphere
Portal
Detailed use case
Expose elements of the SAP user experience
inside of IBM WebSphere Portal software
Casual use case
Create a new user experience
that 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 ow

Dynamic proling that enables adaptive applications to display
diferent data, allow diferent tasks and enable diferent
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 SAP
Integrating 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 ofers exibility
because you can reuse the data as you rene the user experience
and build new ones. By separating SAP integration from the user
experience you also bufer 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 bufer that provides access to SAP and
non-SAP systems through web services. It simplies 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 signicant benets longer
term with the agility gained with the service-oriented
architecture.
7 IBM Software
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 bufered through this web services
layer, which provides exibility to changing release level and
updates to SAPhelping ensure that your new web experiences
continue to work.
SAP NetWeaver Gateway
SAP NetWeaver Gateway can also be used with Web Experience
Factory. NetWeaver Gateway ofers connectivity to SAP
applications without the need for specic 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 user
IBM 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 diferentiated
online experiences to your customers, employees and associates,
which can help you meet business objectives.
For more information
To 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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WSW14178-USEN-00
Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
Lotus Software
IBM Software Group
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Produced in the United States of America
January 2012
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