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Today one of our developers responded to a customer inquiry with an excellent summary of some SAP integration solutions and their relative complexities I thought worth sharing. Please note these are subjective figures and do not represent the views of Microsoft Corporation.
Yes, more information will be needed to come up the best and least complex solution for you. This is break down based on the effort of integration I know currently for each solution.
| Architecture | Integration strength | Dependency | Complexities (1 – 5) | Note |
| BizTalk 2004/SAP adaptor | Full integration suite. No code or minimum code required. | SAP.Net Connector Biztalk 2004 Microsoft.Net and Visual Studio.Net SAP Biztalk Adaptor 2.0 | 3 | New. Need some patient |
| SAP .Net Connector | Low level SDK. Only provide inbound iDoc implementation. You have to develop your own outbound iDoc handler. | Microsoft .Net framework Microsoft visual studio.net | 4 | Flexible and scale. But need dev work on case by case basis |
| Biztalk 2002 and SAP adaptor 1.0 | Full integration suite. | SAP DCOM Component Connector Biztalk 2002 | 3 | Only work with older Biztalk. |
| Flat files with Share folder. | No integration required Full SAP implementation and configuration | None | 2 | |
| SAP Business Connector | SAP implementation. More like Biztalk 2002 with SAP adaptor 1.0 | SAP Business Connector, | 4 | Work well. Competing with Biztalk |
| SAP XI | SAP new product | License required. | ? | New Product and might be the replacement of BCON |
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I'm the Sr. Technology Architect for Microsoft's internal SAP implementation. I started at MS in Database Operations working on SQL 6.0 and 6.5 (even a little 4.2). There I had the chance to work on every type of DB application at MS from OLTP to Warehousing to DSS. I'm passionate about Microsoft's BI (Business Intelligence) stack - SQL, Analysis Services, Excel and Office Web Components. In previous years I've had the pleasure of doing a lot of script (Windows Scripting Host), ASP (VB), WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), SQLXML, to name a few.
I've been at MS for 8 years, spent 4.5 years before that as the sole IT person at a small Windows software company in Oak Harbor Washington making Bible software called Logos Research Systems. http://www.logos.com
My wife and I keep a little family page going at http://www.thehatch-pack.com featuring many photos of our daughter Kaylie and our 110 lb. Akita named Patch. Oh, and you'll find our cat there too - a seal point ragdoll named Granita.
