SAP TechEd Day 1

I attended 4 sessions this afternoon:

PRTL105 - The Integrated SAP Internet Transaction Server in SAP Web AS and PRTL102 - UI Clients for SAP NetWeaver '04: SAP is retiring their stand alone ITS server product and integrating ITS into the Web AS 6.40 server.  We don't use ITS internally at MS, but this change does offer some opportunities to investigate.  Specifically, SAPGUI for HTML functionality offers browser support for standard SAP transactions.  It has been supported in ITS for a while, but was complex since you had to deploy dedicated ITS servers.  Now we can provide browser access to SAP transaction directly from the same application server tier we already have.  Requirements for the Integrated ITS functionality are the WebAS 6.40 server, including both the kernel and programs delivered with WebAS 6.40.  We are on the 6.40 kernel, but have not upgraded or installed the WebAS 6.40 server to include the programs.  I'm not sure what we have to do to install those programs into our 4.7 environment.  OSS note 709038 covers the new integrated ITS functionality.

XI301 - Developing Adapters for the SAP XI Adapter Framework: This talk was a complete waste of time because the presenter was terrible.  He never covered how to develop adapters for XI, but spent the whole time talking about the framework that supports adapters.  His talk was fragmented and confusing with very complex architecture slides that didn't help me understand anything.

PRTL103 - Introduction to SAP Portal Development Kit for .Net - This was a FANTASTIC talk, both in terms of the content - the new PDK SAP is releasing for creating iViews for SAP Enterprise Portal (analogous to WebParts for Sharepoint) - as well as the presenter Yossi Pik from SAP Israel development labs.  He was funny, well paced, and articulate.  The PDK offers developers the ability to create iViews using Visual Studio.Net and .Net technologies for integration into the SAP Enterprise Portal.  The development experience is very complete, including the ability to visually design the iView by drag-n-grop controls, create connections to SAP systems that are persisted in the VS Server Explorer, and deploy the iView into the portal environment directly from Visual Studio.  The architecture they have created behind the PDK is also well done.  They have used .Net Remoting to create an interop layer between the J2EE engine on the SAP Portal server and the ASP.Net Engine; they also created ASP.Net user controls that wrap the SAP controls expected by portal for use on the design surface.  If you want to create iViews that access SAP information, the strategy to do this with the PDK involves using the SAP .Net Connector.  This is cool because it increases visibility and use of the .Net Connector to SAP developers that want to use .Net.