SAP Workflow with non-SAP systems

[Rickayzen, Alan]

Good for you Peter!
This forward thinking will help your company enormously in the long term.
 
The company David mentioned is now called Actional www.actional.com and they
have some good technology which links up seamlessly with SAP WebFlow.
 
You'll find that the APIs that Stephan mentioned are also just the thing for
integrating other software where you don't require the comfort provided by
Actional.
 
I've just returned from the European AIIM conference (www.aiim.org) and was
overwhelmed by the interest in Wf-XML, the only open interface for generic
eProcess management. WebFlow Release 4.6C supports this interface so if XML
is important for your company (I hope it is), then this might be the way to
go.
 
 
Kind regards,
Alan Rickayzen
BPT Product Management
http://service.sap.com/webflow
 
PS: This XML enablement was the catalyst for changing the name from SAP
Business Workflow to SAP WebFlow.
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Stephan Becker [mailto:stephan.becker at london.com]
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2000 4:38 PM
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: SAP Workflow with non-SAP systems
 
 
SAP Workflow has a set of APIs with which it can be integrated into a
heterogenous workflow architecture; i.e. SAP workflows can be
started/influenced from non-SAP systems, and SAP workflow can trigger
non-SAP processing.
The APIs are according to specifications of the Workflow Management
Coalition.
Systems like David mentions them use those APIs and may thus be initially
easier to implement, but may be inflexible due to the amount of metadata
available..
Look at the function groups starting with SWE.. and also download the latest
documentation from SAPnet, you'll find APIs mentioned in them also.
Stephan
 
------Original Message------
From: David Weston <weston at clockwork.ca>
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Sent: October 9, 2000 2:14:11 PM GMT
Subject: Re: SAP Workflow with non-SAP systems
 
 
Hi Peter
 
It might be worth looking at some of the third party products that
can read SAP's business objects and methods as proxy objects.
 
One such example is Visual Edge's Madrid product but there are others.
 
Regards
Dave
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: SAP Workflow [mailto:Owner-SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of
Roehlen, Peter
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2000 3:09 AM
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: SAP Workflow with non-SAP systems
 
 
Hi all,
 
The company I work for are just now starting to get excited about the
possibilities behind creating all of our business processes as workflows.  I
am pushing this as an ABAP developer and the self-nominated workflow person
here even though I am still fairly new to workflow.
 
The inevitable question has come up:  How do we include processes and steps
in our non-SAP systems, and events from our non-SAP systems as steps in our
SAP workflows?
 
For some background information, our non-SAP core systems are mostly Oracle
based (as is our SAP system), running on Unix.  We do have a couple of
Visual Basic front end/SQL server back end systems as well.
 
If anyone has any suggested reading topics or advice I would appreciate all
comments.
 
Thanks
 
Peter.
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