I am developing a business application and, provided that many companies look for integration, I would like to make it "compatible" with business systems like SAP or Navision. What mechanisms do these systems use for importing/exporting/syncing data with third-party applications?
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"would like to make it compatible with SAP or Navision" is like "would like to make it run on Windows and Solaris" - this question in its current form is way too broad for the Q&A format of SO. – vwegert May 30 '15 at 10:45
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The answer to "would like to make it run on Windows and Solaris" would be, for example, "use Java". I'm just asking if there exists a common approach for exchanging data between SAP/Navision and third-party software. – Manel Quiarló May 30 '15 at 10:50
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"Use an interface." There you go, did that help? – vwegert May 30 '15 at 11:39
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1In our company we make use of IDocs for external systems. Check XI/PI documentation and Netweaver for a better reference. Hope it helps. – Nelson Miranda May 30 '15 at 12:58
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Thank you nmiranda for a constructive answer ;-) – Manel Quiarló May 30 '15 at 14:38
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@ManelQuiarló Glad to help. Best regards. – Nelson Miranda May 31 '15 at 15:44
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There exist software tools known as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) whose purpose is to act as middleware to enable the integration of applications across a company.
Apache Camel is an example of such framework, but there exist many of them. You can find a comparison list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_business_integration_software
As the user nmiranda pointed out, in the case of SAP, the framework used for data interchange is SAP PI (SAP NetWeaver Process Integration).
I think your question was actually aimed to find this "starting point", wasn't it? I faced the same question some years ago and I also wondered if there was any "standard" interface to integrate applications. In such case, I hope have helped you.
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Thank you for your answer. I'll take a look at Apache Camel. It seems it has an extension for SAP NetWeaver. – Manel Quiarló May 31 '15 at 12:32
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There are multiple ways to integrate with ERP data sources. You can do batch integration where you setup a query that pulls the data from the source ERPs on a scheduled bases. ETL tools like Informatica and Talend shines on this front.
If you want online data integration when you want live data in your business application then you need to look at Data Virtualization solutions like Denodo, VirtDB or Composite.
Prices, feature sets, performance and flexibility highly differ. One distinguishing factor in my practice is security. Solutions tend to extract data into file system, which makes a problem when sensitive data is extracted. In real projects, implementors usually start a long process replicating the source system security objects in the target application.
David Beck
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