AL-Infotech

I’m not sure if this should be an obituary or a eulogy entitled “Ode to SAP NetWeaver Components”? Anyway it got your attention and I should proceed. If you are involved with any SAP NetWeaver projects, this is essential for you to know.

In the late hours of October 28th 2005, the term ‘SAP NetWeaver components’ passed peacefully away into SAP product terminology history and was put to rest from future SAP NetWeaver use at SAP. They were the fortunate victims of the evolution of the single SAP NetWeaver platform. It was a very somber and poignant moment for the SAP NetWeaver teams as this page in SAP NetWeaver terminology closed and they joined other famous past terms like mySAP.com (remember the enjoy release smiley? sob sob!!), SAP R/3, SAP Basis, SAP R/2, etc.
Coincidently the date coincided with the birth of the SAP NetWeaver 2004s release of SAP NetWeaver (i.e. into the Ramp-up program).

Fortunately we opened a new page and SAP NetWeaver has a terminology succession plan! You may have seen a sneak preview of them at the ‘SAP NetWeaver, BW, and Portals’ conference, ASUG conferences, and our SAP TechEds.
‘SAP NetWeaver components’ have been succeeded by the IT-Practice & IT-Scenario concepts. SAP NetWeaver, the platform, will be rolled out based upon these concepts going forward. Therefore we strongly encourage you to become familiar with these new concepts as it will affect everyone who comes in contact with SAP NetWeaver or SAP NetWeaver powered by applications. They are already here!
For system administrators I suggest that you also look at the new “usage type” concept too.
My colleague, Matt Kangas, has a good introductory Blog on these concepts here. (https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/2731)
To see how IT Practices and IT Scenarios are implemented in the SAP Service Marketplace SAP NetWeaver home page click here (http://service.sap.com/netweaver)
For the people without access to the SAP Service Marketplace, for the information on the published IT Practices, click here (http://www.sap.com/solutions/netweaver/itpractices/index.epx)
And for information on the published IT Scenarios, click here (http://www.sap.com/solutions/businessmaps/6064CC13D46849EC8491E2308AA43795/index.epx)
Update: SDN is now moving to the IT Practice and IT Scenario view too: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/developerareas/itpractices

So you say, “What exactly went the way of the Dodo?” (kind of like a funeral crasher’s question “who was he? - I’m just here for the food and drinks!”
For those of you who don’t know what a funeral crasher is, it’s a wedding crasher who realized that you don’t have to bring a present to a Wake! A Dodo is a casualty of evolution or unintelligent design (not too politically correct I guess.. oops)

Well, the SAP NetWeaver components themselves evolved from the new dimension product names and were rolled into SAP NetWeaver in 2003. Unfortunately for historians the actual SAP NetWeaver component names also evolved in the short 3 years too – more times than Prince has changed his name! Did someone get paid per name change?
I’ll endeavor to explain the rationale for sending the components to the branding graveyard in the sky later in the post mortem at the end of the blog.
So moving on, here are the terms that will no longer be used going forward for describing SAP NetWeaver;

• SAP NetWeaver Application Server (formerly SAP Web Application Server – SAP Web AS)
• SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (formerly SAP Business Information Warehouse - SAP BW)
• SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure (formerly SAP Exchange Infrastructure - SAP XI)
• SAP NetWeaver Portal (formerly SAP Enterprise Portal – SAP EP)
• SAP NetWeaver Mobile (formerly SAP Mobile Infrastructure – SAP MI)

  The astute readers will notice that SAP NetWeaver MDM escaped the axe, but this is only temporary until it is rolled into the SAP NetWeaver synchronized release and that’s a blog of its own on its roadmap!

Note that while the SAP NetWeaver components are no longer used by SAP for all NEW content delivered as of SAP NetWeaver 2004s, the ghost of SAP NetWeaver components past will still haunt the SAP websites and materials until SAP NetWeaver ’04 leaves maintenance (2013!). Now that’s some haunting!

As with every loss, some of the readers will have mixed feelings about this progress. We have already had some interactive discussions and we encourage feedback via SDN forums and blog discussions too - we will endeavor to follow up and to provide bereavement counseling ;-). Some of you will move on quickly to the new concepts, but some of you will have some difficulty with the loss and change – in particular the more mature SAP NetWeaver customers/partners who used these components before there was SAP NetWeaver (yes those exciting pioneer New Dimension days).
With regard to moving on, you will start to see the components phased out on SAP Service Marketplace, online help, SDN, and other SAP product information repositories – Just remember all new materials will be IT-Practice/IT Scenario based going forward. If you are looking for functionality grouping names to describe SAP NetWeaver, you still have the SAP NetWeaver ‘fridge’ with the ‘key capabilities’ listed. The fridge is not deceased, but it will continue to evolve as more capabilities are added … and there are more coming next year – of course!

The Post-Mortem:

SAP NetWeaver components’ time has simply past, the meaning just gave out and we cannot use them to adequately describe the new integrated capabilities of SAP NetWeaver. The components segregated the technology platform into meaningful point-in-time ‘buckets’ but things have radically changed since their inception. With the new release of SAP NetWeaver (SAP NetWeaver 2004s) these buckets quite frankly do not adequately represent what IT is doing with SAP NetWeaver to deliver business solutions. SAP NetWeaver’s integration really blurs the lines between ‘old components’ and makes most of them irrelevant within the context of the platform. That is, the sum of all of the components into a whole platform means that the underlying technology can be reused and developed upon in any context. Essentially, the whole platform is greater than the sum of the parts (components).

It’s a natural progression that occurs with most technology evolution, innovation and progress. The emphasis here is ‘progression’ as customers can easily utilize and expand using the the new IT Practice/IT Scenario concepts with their existing SAP NetWeaver deployments. No point in throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

I’ll give a quick example:
- In the past the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (aka SAP BW) component represented data warehousing functionality running on the SAP NetWeaver Application Server (aka SAP Web AS) ABAP stack.
- The BI capabilities of SAP NetWeaver 2004s are now built on technologies from other ‘old components’ of SAP NetWeaver and some clever new technology too! In short if we use the previous ‘component’ view, you will now need the SAP NetWeaver Portal running on the SAP NetWeaver Application Server Java stack with some special SAP NetWeaver BI Java capabilities in addition to the old SAP NetWeaver BI component to develop/deploy queries and analytical applications and to manage the Data Warehouse – Phew!. So doing the math…



Does the SAP NetWeaver BI component name still fit if you are using most of the technology of the platform?
We don’t think so… so it’s time for the old terminology to die and a bigger, better concept to take its place.

R.I.P.

Needless to say, security is one of the important factors to make web services ubiquitous both whithin and beyond your enterprise boundries. There exists a myriad of WS security standards either approved or in the works by the standards bodies, and SAP is behind every one of the them (see OASIS Web Services Security (WSS) TC). But their basic goal is to enable applications to exchange SOAP messages securely. Specifically, the standands define security tokens that can be used to authenticate SOAP messages, maintain message integrity and confidentiality. This include Username Token, X.509 Token, Kerberos Token, and etc. 

Despite of the large number of standards produced in the WS-security area, several questions remain unclear to me. How much available are these standards in SAP Netweaver? And do NW user community know how to take advantage of these advanced capabilities? What about interoperability to similar implementations in other platforms such as Microsoft’s WSE and Indigo?

It seems like most of web services practitioners are not yet there today from what I found out. Many implementations are either using non-secure SOAP over HTTP, or using transport security over HTTPS. But this may not be sufficient in today’s world of stricter compliance requirements. Imagine a .NET client program that access ERP functionality through XI using web services. How does the application ensure end-to-end security? How does it keep track of the access record of the .NET user? There are SAP propietary ways to secure applications such as using SSO ticket or SNC. But in the world of more standards, I wanted to learn how well NW does it.

I tried to find out what NW 04 provides in terms of supporting WS-security and how well it works with WSE 3.0 in one of my projects. To my dismal, I was not able to get XI SOAP adapter using X.509 for signatures to work. I turned to use WebAS Java instead since there is a great article on SDN on how to make this work. Although I was able to finally make my WebAS Java programs to talk to WSE 3.0 programs securely, there are many limiations and gotchas in my findings. I plan to share those details with you in a separate article.

Overall, support of WS-security in NW 04 is limited and also little known to the NW community in my experience. There are issues when it comes to exchange secure SOAP messages with other Web Services platforms such as Microsoft’s. The great news I heard is that many of these issues are being addressed in NW development and will be incorporated in future NW releases.

Introduction

The IT senario Enabling Enterprise Services belongs to the IT Practice ESA - Design and Deployment. SAP’s Enabling Enterprise Services IT scenario is a way of packaging the required capabilities, tools, infrastructure, and knowledge that companies require to extend their solutions by providing and integrating enterprise services into their business processes. 

At the heart of every business is a constant drive for growth.Companies can achieve this growth by adopting two fundamental strategies. They can drive top-line growth through innovation to realize a competitive advantage; and they can achieve bottom-line growth through efficiencies and increased productivity. 

The key problem your IT organization faces in supporting this growth is that, despite your best efforts, the amount of change that must be implemented in a given time frame continues to accelerate. Keeping up with your organization’s rapidly changing business requirements is becoming increasingly difficult. 

 

Further complicating matters is the fact that innovations that successfully differentiate your company today will inevitably be copied by your competitors and, over time, become standard practices. At that point, the emphasis shifts from innovation to determining how productively and efficiently you can run those routine business processes. 

 

This situation creates a dilemma for IT. On one hand, innovation is often supported by custom applications, usually built from scratch. On the other hand, packaged applications facilitate standardization while capturing best practices. 

 

Building new, customized solutions that support innovation is expensive and time-consuming because leveraging the functionality of your existing packaged applications is extremely difficult. And, as an innovative solution becomes a standard practice, you have to migrate this custom-built application into a packaged solution. The value of the process has changed, and this is reflected in its cost to the organization. 

To meet these challenges, IT organizations are investigating and implementing service-oriented architectures. A service-oriented architecture is a distributed software model that uses independent Web services to support business processes. These Web services can be used and reused in sequences defined by business logic to form applications that enable specific business processes. The constructs of the typical SOA approach, however, tend to focus exclusively on the technology framework — and neglect the larger business process. A combined focus on both application and infrastructure is needed to make this business-IT symbiosis work. SAP uses its business experience and enterprise software to provide exactly this combination: SAP’s Enterprise SOA is SOA plus something called enterprise services — aggregations of Web services glued together by business logic to help execute a business process. In other words, enterprise services are Web services that have an enterprise level business meaning. To get started with Enterprise SOA, companies must service-enable their enterprise’s applications. Service enablement refers to the isolation of an enterprise application’s specific functionality and its implementation through open standards to make the functionality accessible as a service. Such service-enablement is the basis for ESA-compliant applications. 

Enabling Enterprise Services in SAP NetWeaver adds business value to enterprises today because they can create new value from existing IT assets by making existing application functionalities available as a Web service. This enables companies to combine functions in a single process even if they are implemented in widely differing software components. Companies can also leverage the flexibility of implementation either in ABAP or Java by using the SAP NetWeaver infrastructure that supports both programming languages. 

Preview Enterprise Services

To preview the enterprise services being built by SAP sign on to the ES Workplace on the SAP Developer NetWork (https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/developerareas/esa/esapreview). Based on the Enterprise SOA Preview System, the new ES Workplace lets you browse and test enterprise services.The ES Workplace allows you to drill down from industry to solution map to business scenario, all the way to the service and WSDL (from the ESR) for that service, as shown in the figure below. Customers, especially on the business side, can really see what enterprise services SAP has to offer for their particular industry or application area. 

Enabling Enterprise Services - Scenario Variants

The Enabling Enterprise Services IT scenario includes the following scenario variants:
Point-to-point, services-based integration
This scenario variant provides for exposing ABAP and Java functionality on the SAP NetWeaver Application Server as Web services via Web services standard protocols.The service provisioning is done without mediation by an integration broker..
Brokered services-based integration
This scenario variant enables you to run a Web service scenario using the integration broker as the integration/communication engine between the service consumer and the service provider.This especially makes sense if the additional capabilities of the integration broker will be used.

New Capabilities Available with SAP NetWeaver 2004s

The IT senario Enabling Enterprise Services provides the same functionalities for SAP NetWeaver 2004s as for SAP NetWeaver 04, i. e. there are no differences in the capabilities for this IT scenario.