SAP and MS Office Integration Architecture
Integration between SAP and Microsoft products hinges upon the use of OLE, a common and standard technology for transferring and sharing information among applications. With OLE, you can take data out of your SAP system and place it into another system, all the while maintaining the format and integrity of the data. For example, you can view data residing in any number of SAP database tables as a series of columns and rows in Microsoft Excelan easy way to view and manipulate data otherwise trapped in the SAP database.
The SAP Assistant is the OLE interface used for calling SAP functions and transactions from other non-SAP applications. The SAP Assistant exposes both ActiveX controls and OLE object classes, for logging in to SAP, managing data and tables, calling functions and transactions, and more. SAP systems are therefore designed today so that you can share data with any OLE-compatible application. Sample OLE-compatible applications include
- Microsoft Office, including Visio and other products
- Corel Office, including Paradox
- Star Office
- Lotus Smart Suite
- Many Web Server development environments, such as Microsoft FrontPage
Additionally, nearly all modern application development languages in use today support OLE. This includes the old-school C++ programming language as well as the latest and greatest Microsoft .NET Visual Basic offerings, to IBM’s WebSphere Information Integrator and PowerBuilder by Sybase. In this way, the developer of a non-SAP application can create objects that can access information in SAP.
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Tags: Integration, SAP