SAP Global Alliance Technology Team Blog

SAP GUI Support for Win 7

As Microsoft has announced the availability of Windows 7 at Oct. 22 2009, we have raised the question of early support for Win 7 by SAP GUI with SAP. The official statement of SAP is SAP GUI 7.20 will support Win 7. Information about the schedule and features supported are in SAP note 147519 which basically says:

SAP GUI for Windows 7.20 is scheduled for shipment in March / April 2010. The new SAP GUI release is planned to offer the following new features among others:

• Support for Windows 7 operating system
• Support for Office 14 package

As this schedule would potentially cause some problems with customers who would like to roll-out Win 7 early after RTM, we have gotten the following statement from SAP:

All SAP customers which will go live with Win 7 after SAP GUI 7.20 is publicly available in March 2010 (End of March) are required to install SAP GUI 7.20. All SAP customers however who want to go live with Win 7 before this time will be supported by SAP as pilot customers by installing SAP GUI 7.10 on Win 7. This consequently means there are no changes in the official announcement about support for Win 7 which will start with the availability of SAP GUI 7.20.

All customers who want to get earlier support for Win 7 (based on SAP GUI 7.10) have to contact SAP and will be registered on a list. SAP will support those registered customers in their best possible way - however, there is a time until than those customer will have to upgrade to SAP GUI 7.20. This time is end of June 2010. One of the requirements is the use of all actual patches. Corrections from SAP side will not be documented but will be shipped as part of the normal patch process. SAP will of course provide intense testing of SAP GUI 7.10 on Win 7.

- Josef

SAP GUI 7.10 SP 13 - Support for Office 2007 Formats (*.docx and *.xlsx) and for Internet Explorer 8

Hello,

SAP released SP13 for SAP GUI beginning of May. With this service pack SAP announced two important new features:

·         Support of IE 8 in SAP GUI, see SAP note 66971

“Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 is supported by SAP GUI for Windows 7.10 as of patchlevel 13.”

·         Support for Office 2007 files (*.docx and *.xlsx), note 1286768

“With new changes done in SAP Office Integration, both old .DOC & .XLS as well as new *.DOCX & *.XLSX files of MS Office will be supported.
Previously from SAP Office Integration it was only possible to work with compound document formats. As new Microsoft Office 2007 (*.docx, *.xlsx) files are non-compound document, it was not possible for SAP Office Integration to support the same. Now *.DOCX and *.XLSX format are also supported.”

SAP changed this in SP 13 for SAP GUI and DOCX as well as XLSX files are now supported. See also SAP note 1286768.

- Juergen

New White Paper about Hyper-V for SAP Best Practice

As I got often asked about planning for the right infrastructures and operation for SAP in virtualized installations using Hyper-V, I just finished my White Paper which gives answers here. It addresses the aspect of SAP sizing and support, design of network and storage infrastructures, high availability, licensing and management of such infrastructures. The White Paper can be found here:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/9/0/990A0669-8EEA-4B30-BB39-A2CD0F0D761B/BestPracticeforSAPonHyper-VWhitePaperv1.9.docx

or on our Virtualization website:

http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/solutions/business-critical-applications/default.mspx

Have fun working with Hyper-V

Josef

SAP Sapphire and ASUG Annual Conference in Orlando is around the corner – Microsoft presentations at the event

The annual ASUG conference and SAP SAPPHIRE will take place from May 11^th – May 14^th in Orlando, Florida. As every year Microsoft will be attending the exhibition with an own booth so if you have any questions regarding SAP running on Windows Server, SAP and SQL Server, or SAP – Microsoft Interoperability, feel free to stop by and ask the experts.

In addition we will have a few presentations about Microsoft and SAP, three of them presented by me:

·         Microsoft and SAP Interoperability - Monday, May 11, 1:00 p.m.

Half-Day Seminar Monday, May 11, 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. $295 ASUG member/$395 non-member Come join us for this pre-conference seminar, and learn about the current state and future direction of interoperability between Microsoft and SAP. Hear directly from SAP’s and Microsoft’s interoperability gurus about interoperability between their respective portal technology platforms: SAP NetWeaver Portal, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). More companies are now embracing dual portal strategies. Discover what portal interoperability solutions and scenarios are available now and what is on the road map. Explore how to leverage the strengths of both portal technology platforms. Additionally, come hear about interoperating directly with SAP backend systems via Web services such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), the Web Dynpro development environment, and .NET. Learn about other non-portal interoperability solutions and scenarios, what methods are available now, and what may be coming for future use. Hear discussions from Microsoft, SAP, and customers on Microsoft and SAP interoperability. Learn more about which interoperability methods are best under different circumstances and how these interoperability methods should best be utilized.

·         Microsoft Office SharePoint and SAP NetWeaver: Interoperability - Tuesday, May 12, 2:00 p.m.

This session covers interoperability between the SAP NetWeaver™ technology platform (including the SAP NetWeaver Portal component and a backend supported by SAP NetWeaver), Duet software, and Microsoft Office business applications. Attendees will learn about the next release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, interoperability with SAP software, and standards such as WSRP, as well as about advanced Web services for achieving a standards-based integration between Microsoft Office SharePoint and SAP software. In addition, this session explores Microsoft’s internal use of SAP software and Microsoft Office SharePoint and its best practices based on this experience.

·         Interoperability at Microsoft IT: What Is in Production Every Day - Thursday, May 14, 10:30 a.m.

Learn the “in’s and out’s” of interoperability between Microsoft and SAP software as practiced by Microsoft IT for their internal SAP deployments. Look at a range of solutions, from Duet software to embedding the Web Dynpro development environment and SharePoint, OBAs (Office Business Applications), to full service-oriented architecture (SOA) application development in a .net environment. See examples of single sign-on (SSO), connector technologies, and others that are used in production today. Discuss the architectural factors that lead to this landscape. Examples are drawn from recruiting applications (including the deployment of an SAP application on a MS SharePoint platform, SSO, BSP, integration with Web Dynpro, SAP enhancement package considerations, and point of contact work with Duet) and pricing applications (including SOA compositions, OBA integration, WCF connector (replacement for .net connector), as well as any other “tricks” the presenters may have.

 Other presentations about Microsoft – SAP are:

·         Microsoft and SAP - Better Together- Tuesday, May 12, 10:30 a.m.

Microsoft and SAP are longstanding partners. This session focuses on the opportunity that you, as a customer, have in using the best of both IT worlds. Uncover how we interoperate beyond SQL and Duet. Learn how you should think about security, search federation, mobility, infrastructure, user interface strategy, and much more in this informative session.

·         Why Duet Matters for Your IT Organization's Success - Tuesday, May 12, 1:15 p.m.

Duet delivers efficient, out-of-the-box scenarios that provide functionality for information workers and business managers - and enable IT to provide transparent, SAP best practices to new user groups. Hear real-world examples of how one customer is utilizing Duet. Consider lessons learned and recommendations from the organization's IT group. Understand the implementation roadmap and skills that ensure a highly successful Duet deployment.

Hope to talk to you during one of the presentations or at the Microsoft booth!

- Juergen

Connecting Line-of-Business (LOB) Systems like SAP and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

It’s a very common scenario that customers or partners use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server in combination with their different LOB Systems like SAP, PeopleSoft, or Siebel. For connecting from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server the customer has various choices depending on the version of the backend system and the needed functionality. Microsoft shipped the BizTalk Adapter Pack which allows you to connect to LOB Systems like SAP and use the exposed functionality from Visual Studio directly or through Microsoft BizTalk Server. A few colleagues now published a document describing how to use this Adapter Pack in order to connect LOB Systems with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. You will find the document here, more information about the BizTalk Adapter Pack can be found at this Tutorial and at the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack Samples page.  

- Juergen

UI Strategies – OBAs and MOSS for SAP Overview Paper published

We published a new whitepaper about Office Business Applications and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for SAP; you can find the paper here: UI Strategies - OBAs and MOSS for SAP. The paper gives a short overview of what’s possible today when integrating Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with SAP or when building an Office Business Application accessing SAP Line-of-Business Systems.

Currently we are working on two new papers which should be published in the next couple of weeks, one describing how to setup the WSRP Toolkit for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (can be found in the MSDN Code Gallery) and consuming this Web Parts then in SAP NetWeaver Portal, the second one about a Silverlight application hosted in Office SharePoint Server showing information about timesheets and employees from the SAP system.

- Juergen

New whitepaper about Microsoft BI - Unloading fact data from SAP BI 7.0

We have published a new whitepaper in the Interoperability - Business Intelligence area. This time Hermann Daeubler gives an overview of how to unload fact data from a SAP BI 7.0 system using th Queryview Web Service. You will find a sample C# application which connects via Web Services to the SAP BI system and which allow you to unload fact data which then can be used for further steps in a Microsoft based solution. This approach does not require the installation of any additonal adapters or DLLs. The paper can be found at Unloading fact data from SAP BI 7.0 using the Queryview Web Service and C#.

- Juergen

Microsoft .NET and SAP – The Book from MSPRESS will be published beginning of February

Nearly one year ago we I contacted MSPRESS and asked them whether they are interested in publishing a book about Microsoft .NET and SAP. When SAP told me they would be interested in publishing such a book I asked my colleagues Steve Fox, Scott Adams, and Thomas Reimer to take over some topics and we started writing and developing the samples. After one year of moonlighting work we finally finished the book and it will be published at the beginning of February. You can find the information about the book at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Books/12513.aspx, it has 480 pages full of information around Microsoft and SAP, and we covered topics like:

·         Microsoft BI and SAP

·         SharePoint and SAP

o    iView Web Parts

o    Business Server Pages

·         Office Communication Server

·         Microsoft InfoPath

·         Web Services

·         …

For most of the topics we have included detailed walk-through’s so that you can use the samples as a basis for developing your own solutions.

I hope the book will help you in your work in the Microsoft/SAP Interoperability space, if you are more interested in a book which covers SAP running on Windows take a look to the book from my colleague Josef Stelzel (http://www.sappress.com/product.cfm?account=&product=H2902) published at SAP Press.

- Juergen

Whitepaper about Federated Search between Microsoft Search Server and SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search

My colleague Andre Fischer from SAP and two mote SAP employees just published a new whitepaper about the integration of Microsoft Serach Server and SAP's NetWeaver Enterprise Search. They used the OpenSearch interface from NetWeaver Enterprise Search that lets you use results from Enterprise Search within any OpenSearch Client, in this case Microsoft Search Server 2008. SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search can be configured as a federated search location within Microsoft Search Server 2008 based on the Open Search standard. You will find the whitepaper at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/a0250b6b-44ae-2b10-1c91-b5ce2ebf8f4d. 

- Juergen  

New Whitepaper – iView Web Part Restrictions in MOSS 2007

We just published a new whitepaper about integrating iViews from SAP NetWeaver Portal in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; you can find the paper at http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/F/2/BF2C3AAD-BC64-496C-B3BC-72ADD9617E2C/iView%20Integration%20with%20Microsoft%20Office%20SharePoint%20Server.pdf.

You will ask why such a whitepaper is necessary since MOSS ships with the iView Web Part Toolkit, a Web Part which allows you to grap an iView from SAP NetWeaver Portal and display this iView in a Web Part in the SharePoint Portal (you can find a description of the iView We Part here). This iView has some problems with iViews based on SAP’s Web Dynpro technology as well as with SAP BI iViews, the Web Part will try to loop the iView and will go into an infinite loop. It’s also necessary to use SharePoint’s Enterprise Single Sign-on which a lot of customers don’t want to do, instead of this they would like to use the SAP SPNego Login Module (for information about Single Sign-on see here). The new whitepaper describes how to build a generic Web Part which allows you to display iViews from the SAP NetWeaver Portal without having the problems with the infinite loop as well as having the possibility to use other Single Sign-on techniques which can be used.

- Juergen

The SharePoint Team announced the WSRP Toolkit for SharePoint

The SharePoint team announced today the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Toolkit for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (see http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/12/05/announcing-the-wsrp-toolkit-for-sharepoint.aspx) so you will now be able to expose SharePoint data via WSRP and consume this data in the WSRP consumer which ships with the SAP NetWeaver Portal.

We described in whitepapers already how you can expose iViews in SAP NetWeaver Portal and consume them in Office SharePoint Server 2007 but keep in mind that only a very small set of iViews can be exposed via WSRP in SAP NetWeaver Portal. You will find the papers at http://www.microsoft.com/isv/sap/technology/interop/sharepoint.aspx.  In the next weeks we will take a look to the WSRP Toolkit for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and we will publish a paper of how to use WSRP enabled SharePoint lists and libraries in SAP NetWeaver Portal.

- Juergen

New whitepaper published about SQL Server 2008 Integration Services 2008 and SAP BI 7.0

Hello,

my colleague Chunhui Zhu, a Technology Architect at Microsoft, published a paper about SQL Server 2008 Integration Services with SAP BI. The white paper demonstrates the use of the Microsoft Connector 1.0 for SAP BI in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services packages. It shows how to load data into SAP BI by using the SAP BI destination, how to extract data from SAP BI by using the SAP BI source, and how to prepare extracted data for analysis in SQL Server Analysis Services. You can find the paper at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd299430.aspx.

Juergen

SAP and Hyper-V: Where to find more info

Hyper-V as virtualization platform for SAP applications get’s more and more focus. I constantly get questions where to find more info on the technology, administration, infrastructure planning, performance, management etc. The good news is: There is plenty of information available – it just may require some time to search for it. In order to help you for a fast ramp-up, I have created over time a list of useful links which points to various areas of interest.

SAP info:

Enter the SDN page https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/windows for info about SAP on Windows. There is a White Paper Virtualizing SAP applications on Windows which describes the configurations, version info and SAP notes to read.  

Microsoft info:

Microsoft page about virtualization technologies in general can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/default.mspx

The following page refers to Hyper-V and points to downloads and technical documentation: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv.aspx

Hyper-V administration:

There are a number of blogs which provides info about administration, configuration, programming  and operation of Hyper-V. The blogs can be found at:

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization

http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/

http://blogs.technet.com/germanvirtualizationblog/default.aspx  (German only)

Performance:

The following blog and document provide guidelines for optimal configuration and performance related issues. The blog can be found at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tvoellm/

The newly revised Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 now also contain a chapter for tuning Hyper-V. The guide can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Perf_tun_srv.mspx

Hyper-V Server:

Hyper-V Server is the new standalone server for Hyper-V which was announced in September 2008.  Find more information and a free download at the following page:

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-VServer

Planning virtual installations:

There is a new toolkit available from Microsoft which helps to plan and prepare for the virtualization of components in Hyper-V. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) tool can be used for this purpose and is freely available. In order to introduce into the tool, there is a video available at:

http://edge.technet.com/Media/MAP-tool-virtualization-demo-with-Baldwin/

A comprehensive description in written format is also available here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977556.aspx

As mentioned above, the tool can be freely downloaded and is available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=67240b76-3148-4e49-943d-4d9ea7f77730&displaylang=en

The version 3.2 of the tool has been recently released at EMEA TechEd 2008 in Barcelona. The following blog provides an update about the new features in the MAP tool:

http://blogs.technet.com/mapblog/archive/2008/11/03/rtm-news-microsoft-assessment-and-planning-toolkit-3-2-now-available.aspx

System Center Virtual Machine Manager:

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/virtualmachinemanager/en/us/default.aspx

Microsoft Connector 1.0 for SAP BI is released to the Web for download on 10/17/2008

The Microsoft Connector for SAP BI is a set of managed components for transferring data to or from SAP NetWeaver BI version 7.0 systems. The component is designed to be used with the Enterprise and Developer editions of SQL Server 2008 Integration Services. To install the component, run the platform-specific installer for x86, x64, or Itanium computers respectively. For more information see the Readme and the installation topic in the Help file. You will find the files at

·         X86 Package(SapBI.msi) - 1943 KB

·         X64 Package (SapBI.msi) - 2848 KB

·         IA64 Package(SapBI.msi) - 4586 KB

·         Readme(Microsoft Connector 1.0 for SAP BI Readme.doc)

The complete Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack from October 2008 can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=228de03f-3b5a-428a-923f-58a033d316e1&DisplayLang=en.

- Juergen

SAP Enterprise Services Explorer for Microsoft .NET – Version 2

SAP just released a new version of the Enterprise Service Explorer for Microsoft .NET on SDN (see https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/dotnet). The new version supports Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 and it allows you also to publish your own Web Services directly into the Enterprise Service Registry. You can download the new version from the link provided above and you will also find documentation about the Enterprise Service Explorer.

- Juergen