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| frodo |
 Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 5:31 am Post subject: Best way to connect MQ to SAP |
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Novice
Joined: 05 May 2003
Posts: 23
Location: Germany
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Hi,
what i am searching for for is a way or a reliable tool to link MQ and SAP.
Is there a no too complex way to do it ourselves?
Perhaps anybody knows a tool that is not to expensive?
I look forward to your hopefully various replies!!
Cheers
Thorsten
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| jhalstead |
| Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 5:51 am Post subject: |
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Master
Joined: 16 Aug 2001
Posts: 258
Location: London
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One of the cheapest off the shelf methods is the IBM MQseries Link for R/3. This will support IDocs.
Other more expensive tools would be:
Sysbase New Era of Networks Adapter for SAP R/3
or
IBM WBI Adapter for SAP R/3
Both of these will look after you meta data discovery and allow it to be used in WMQI broker. In additionthey support BAPI and other methods for transfering data.
To create your own you'd need to write an executable that uses the SAP librarys.
Good luck
Jamie |
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| frodo |
| Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 5:56 am Post subject: |
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Novice
Joined: 05 May 2003
Posts: 23
Location: Germany
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Hi Jamie,
where can i find out more about MQSeries Link and where can we buy it??
Thanks
Thorsten
| jhalstead wrote: |
One of the cheapest off the shelf methods is the IBM MQseries Link for R/3. This will support IDocs.
Other more expensive tools would be:
Sysbase New Era of Networks Adapter for SAP R/3
or
IBM WBI Adapter for SAP R/3
Both of these will look after you meta data discovery and allow it to be used in WMQI broker. In additionthey support BAPI and other methods for transfering data.
To create your own you'd need to write an executable that uses the SAP librarys.
Good luck
Jamie |
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To boldly go, where no one has gone before
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| emiranda |
| Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 9:37 am Post subject: |
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Disciple
Joined: 21 Nov 2002
Posts: 196
Location: Dublin, Ireland
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| bbeardsley |
| Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2003 4:36 pm Post subject: |
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Acolyte
Joined: 17 Dec 2001
Posts: 52
Location: Dallas, TX, USA
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| Another option is the Business Connector by WebMethods. It's robust and fairly easy to use. Not sure about the cost. |
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| emiranda |
| Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2003 6:14 am Post subject: |
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Disciple
Joined: 21 Nov 2002
Posts: 196
Location: Dublin, Ireland
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Remember: WebMethods only connects to WMQ via MQI channels... it's up to you what kind of "robustness" you are looking for.
cheers,
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Warm Regards,
EM |
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| tso0rxp |
| Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2003 10:29 am Post subject: |
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Voyager
Joined: 07 Jan 2002
Posts: 85
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MQ Series R/3 Link (although expiring EOY 2004) has been very reliable for us. We transmit 50,000 IDOC's/day. We also use Mercator ALE to post IDOC's to SAP and use the SAP file port for outbound IDOC's (and drop them to MQ from there).
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Bob Perry
MQ Administrator |
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| zpat |
| Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 2:01 am Post subject: |
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Jedi Council
Joined: 19 May 2001
Posts: 5866
Location: UK
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We looked at this issue some time back and wrote our own adapter which called the SAP RPC interface. Not all SAP functions have IDOC or BAPI interfaces available.
Another reason was performance, we wanted a multithreaded design with a variable number of tasks pulling messages from the request queue.
If you have a really good C or Java programmer, then writing your own adapter gives you a lot more control over how it works.
Or course if something free works then use it. Make sure you stress test it up to production volumes so that you find out if it will meet your performance requirements. |
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| emiranda |
| Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 5:18 am Post subject: |
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Disciple
Joined: 21 Nov 2002
Posts: 196
Location: Dublin, Ireland
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A "sales" view: 
We are talking about companies that bought SAP R/3 systems... it's BIG money! ERP systems suppose to hold the most part of business "core", so it's not about saving money we are discussing, it's strategy: To develop a home solution or to buy an adapter - a very robust and powerful one, regarding to WBIA for mySAP.com.
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Warm Regards,
EM |
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| zpat |
| Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 5:41 am Post subject: |
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Jedi Council
Joined: 19 May 2001
Posts: 5866
Location: UK
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Buying a 3rd party adapter means relying on yet another vendor. SAP provide APIs to access their product. In our case SAP is just a peripheral accounting system.
All we are doing is using the published SAP API interfaces and passing data to and from MQSeries which is hardly rocket science.
Developing just the function you need can make perfect sense. We already had all the MQ adapter logic ready - so just needed to add the SAP API calls.
Who wants to pay software product maintenance fees for evermore? It depends on the local skills available. We are a large IT site and have a lot of MQ experience. Different companies have different approaches. |
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| emiranda |
| Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 5:55 am Post subject: |
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Disciple
Joined: 21 Nov 2002
Posts: 196
Location: Dublin, Ireland
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Your right zpat!
All depends on what the company wants. You can relying on development team or a vendor.
What I meant is everything depends on what your company expects from the business and how fast you can or you need to react.
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Warm Regards,
EM |
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| Michael Dag |
| Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 6:00 am Post subject: |
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Jedi Knight
Joined: 13 Jun 2002
Posts: 2607
Location: The Netherlands (Amsterdam)
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| Quote: |
| In our case SAP is just a peripheral accounting system. |
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| IntegrationJunky |
| Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 2:56 pm Post subject: SAP to MQSeries integration |
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Newbie
Joined: 30 Oct 2003
Posts: 1
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| SAP Business Connector is free and used by over 4k SAP customers. You can buy a MQ Adapter for it cheap from WM, or develop your own simple adapter for it (JMS?). |
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| nlw |
| Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 1:59 am Post subject: webMethods with MQ&SAP... |
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Newbie
Joined: 31 Oct 2003
Posts: 1
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I hear that webMethods are now providing a JMS route to market with a high availabitly, highely secure and scalable JMS solution as part of the integration platform? also providing an open standards based platform (fabric) to support J2EE and .Net so the answer could be nearer than you think with integrating to MQ, websphere and SAP.....
Furthemore SAP are pulling the plug and support on the business connector (see SAP.net for clarification on this) and companies have two choices...moce to webM or XI. Neither will be free but XI looks to be a very expensive route to market, when all you have to do is upgrade to webM Intgeration server lite? XI is vapour ware to date, propietary and non proven.
webM are offering some sort of Business Connector upgrade which is very cheap (25k I think), maintains the webMethods underlying technology and offers access to the full platform...
BC has over 8000 dowloads worldwide, is free and is widely used in production, safely and securely. companies like Shell are more than happy to run a 22 billion dollar procurement cycle through business connector based on webMethods technology.... |
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| wmqiguy |
| Posted: Fri Nov 07, 2003 12:58 pm Post subject: |
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Centurion
Joined: 09 Oct 2002
Posts: 145
Location: Florida
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I always love the SAP Adapter questions. Imagine this scenario:
Guy goes out and buys a premium sports car. Spends a quarter of a million dollars. Happy as can be. Then he drives it home and realizes that he has a gravel driveway. First thing he does is call the asphalt company and asks if they can keep it under $20.
Personally, I have used:
1. MQLink for R/3. Great if you only want to use IDOCs. Don't worry about the maintenance....this thing is pretty stable.
2. NEON (Sybase). Okay tool, but is way to pricy, unless you already knee-deep in WMQI/NEON development and then you can start to see some value. Otherwise, forget it. NEON formats can be complicated....especially considering you may need to tweak it for performance.
3. iWay. It is nice in that it converts everything to XML, but under the covers they are selling a transformation engine like WMQI (although much weaker).
And lastly, I have not written my own for SAP, but we are supporting a custom API in an easy to use .dll. The trick here is that you can spend a lot of time trying to support this thing.
I suppose that my final advice is to pick the technology that fits your organization. You have a fleet of programmers....by all means, roll your own. You have money to spend...throw technology and consultants at it.
Good luck out there.  |
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