Integrating Islands with Landmasses

EAI notes and thoughts

Monday, November 28, 2005

SAP Internet Sales (R/3) Overview

I am presently involved in an integration with the relatively new SAP Internet Sales product. Here is an overview on it.

SAP Internet Sales (R/3) is part of the mySAP CRM suite based on the Self Service pattern. It is an Order Management and CRM System that allows customers to browse products, configure and place orders.

Architecture overview
Internally, SAP Internet Sales uses Material Management, Customer Master, Catalog Management, Order Management and Contract Management modules. It is based on an MVC architecture on top of the SAP J2EE engine. Layers are present that map to the Model, View and Control as follows:
  • Presentation/View: Interaction and Presentation Layer
  • Model: Business Objects Layer
  • Control: Business Logic Services Layer
The communication with the model happens through a Java Connector. An Index Server to optimize search/browse of products and a Pricing & Configurator module are built in.

Other features in SAP Internet Sales are:
  • Orders are saved in real time in R/3 with no delay or intermediate storage
  • Web access user accounts are created for customers existing in SAP R/3. The usual process of users registering through the web for accounts in R/3 is also possible.
  • Material Master module is the foundation of the catalog
  • Product catalog uses the material data, prices, multimedia objects and text descriptions to build the catalog

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Monday, November 21, 2005

Estimating Development Effort in EAI - II

Following Vivek and Controlled Agility's thoughts on my post on Estimation in EAI projects, I learnt Function Point (FP) estimation and realized that the thoughts on my earlier post do not hold true for estimation during all phases. FP is the technique to use when estimating at an earlier phase, say costing or discovery, as there are very few details available. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), on the other hand, is best suited for estimation in the development phase, when all the details are available, the development tool has been finalized and resources with expertise in the tool are also available.

I had plans to rewrite my earlier post with FP as the base, but will not do so now because Controlled Agility covers it in more depth in this post.

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Saturday, November 12, 2005

IBM, make up your mind!

I was deciding an integration architecture for a prospective client and suggested the use of IBM Interchange Server (ICS) for an A2A requirement. Another colleague who was documenting the approach mentioned that ICS was not sold independently now and offered as part of WebSphere Integration Server and showed the following links as evidence - http://www-306.ibm.com/software/integration/wbiserver/ and http://www-306.ibm.com/software/integration/wbiserver/faq-43.html. So, we decided to follow the nomenclature and used the name WebSphere Integration Server in our architecture.

When we checked the price of the products with IBM, their representative mentioned that ICS was no longer part of WebSphere Integration Server and was part of another product called WebSphere Server Foundation, so we went ahead and updated the product name. After a short while another IBM representative spoke with us to clarify a few technical queries and mentioned that ICS was part of WebSphere Integration Server and not Server Foundation!


When the final architecture was reviewed, a colleague presented an IBM announcement mail in which it was mentioned that WebSphere Integration Server was being sunset and replaced with ICS independently! At this point, we were at our wit's end. As of the time of this post, I am still not sure whether ICS exists as an independent or as part of WebSphere Integration Server or WebSphere Server Foundation. IBM may make great products but their naming and packaging leaves a lot to be desired.

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