Section 9.2. How does Project Mendocino use ESA?

9.2. How does Project Mendocino use ESA?

Project Mendocino is one of the first examples of an ESA product you can touch. While several tools use ESA in conceptual ways that are sometimes hard to grasp, this tool is based on consuming services in tangible ways that every information worker can benefit from. Project Mendocino shows how ESA can be applied to the user experience through familiar desktop applications. For some users, it will deliver functionality that supercedes the need to work directly with any line-of-business or backend applications. By exposing functionality and giving information workers an easy way to update data that normally resides only on the back end, Project Mendocino embraces the revolutionary potential of ESA.

Project Mendocino is a prime example of how SAP is using services, exposed from ERP, in new ways that create enormous value. And these services can be used together, even though they may have been written for a system that was not designed specifically for ESA. This fulfills one of SAP's short-term goals for ESA adoption: to create simple services that work on top of the applications already used by organizations. In the future, the entire stack that encompasses ERP, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and all other mySAP solutions will evolve to use business objects as the underlying form of an application. Instead of having a monolithic set of applications, SAP is creating a collection of business objects that can be applied in flexible ways. By the middle of 2007, there will be even more services to choose from than the ones used to support Project Mendocino.

From a purely architectural standpoint, there are a variety of insights here for anyone contemplating the bigger picture of ESA. One is that ESA follows the "model once, run anywhere" model. Instead of hardcoding multiple solutions that apply to different domains, ESA employs business objects that are modeled in a way that allows them to handle different solutions. Project Mendocino is just one of many client-side solutions that ESA will enable. Ultimately, an organization that invests in the ESA infrastructure will be able to leverage it in many different ways.

To understand how this is possible, it is important to become familiar with the new stack defined by ESA.

Project Mendocino overlaps with nearly every part of the new stack:

UI

Project Mendocino utilizes the familiar Microsoft Office desktop interface. This is achieved not by hardcoding the UI, but rather, by modeling the UI in the backend and deploying it to the client.

Process orchestration

Project Mendocino uses a communications hub referred to as the Mendocino extensions to route data to and within the ERP system.

Process integration

Using the Mendocino extensions, Project Mendocino translates data from Microsoft Office applications such as Excel into a format that is easily understood by existing ERP tools and their respective enterprise services.

Process workflow

All of the normal workflow processes within mySAP ERP take place within the context of Microsoft Office's desktop tools.

Distributed persistence

The ability to cache data for working online or offline also plays a part in Project Mendocino's functionality.

Other applications being created by SAP will use different parts of the stack to enable different solutions. But certain services created for Project Mendocino will indirectly benefit all ESA users by increasing the total pool of objects in the Enterprise Services Inventory. Every service and application being created for Project Mendocino is designed in a global way to be used by other applications within the ESA environment. Timesheet entry services are part of the Cross Application Time Sheet (CATS). These enterprise services will be used by many applications that rely on timesheet recording and account assignment.