Integrating SAP with Other Software
Some applications are simply written to act as interfaces, that is, to transfer data from one system to another. SAP has come up with some new technologies that can either reduce the size of or eliminate the need for these types of applications.
Business Connector
The SAP Business Connector provides XML-based secure access to and from SAP applications. Business Connector executes on a server that enables you to receive applications with XML-formatted files; the connector translates these into an intermediate document structure and executes the corresponding SAP transaction. If you send standard SAP IDocs to Business Connector, it will convert the IDocs to an XML-formatted file and send it to the other system.
MySAP.com
MySAP.com is SAP's latest foray into the B2B (Business to Business) world, and is a viable way to integrate applications from one system to another (including both to and from an SAP instance). Companies can exchange transaction-related documents through a portal on the Internet (mySAP.com), as if the transactions were taking place on a single instance of SAP. Suppose that your corporation wants to contract out manufacturing of a widget. If both you and your contract manufacturer are set up on mySAP.com, you will be able to transmit purchase orders, sales orders, invoices, and so on through the mySAP.com portal, without having to develop any point-to-point interfaces.
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XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a method for putting structured data in a text file. If you look at an XML file with a text editor, you will notice a similarity to HTML. XML has tags and attributes, as shown in the following sample:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <NAMELIST NAME="Prima Publishing"></NAMELIST> . .
Compared to HTML, however, XML is much more strict about data layout. You can get away with a missing end tag in HTML, but this is not accepted in XML; an application cannot and should not make a guess about a data file. HTML is used for presentations, whereas XML is used for storing data. Because XML files are text files, they are platform independent; therefore, users can more readily share data between different applications. You'll find more information on XML at www.w3.org/XML.
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