Overview
Stone Bond’s new SAP AppComm stands out from other technologies for SAP connectivity with its embedded intelligent discovery engine, combined with powerful cross-application data transformation capabilities. As a next-generation data analyst’s assistant, SAP AppComm has an easy-to-use graphical user interface that guides the analyst through data selection and building business rules, notifications, special run time error handling, and many other functions all in a drag-and-drop manner. AppComm debugs, architects and constructs the appropriate reusable integration components behind the scenes as the design is underway. Programming is unnecessary. The same environment is used to test and deploy the connectivity. SAP AppComm is the only connector with security and versioned audit trails to ensure that any change to the integration and data workflow processes can be traced back to who, what when.
Extensibility
From with the SAP AppComm designer interface a more technical user can pop into a code editor for either VB.Net or C# and enter snippets of code, which can be tested in the same window. Since SAP AppComm is built on 100% .NET managed code, the environment is fully extensible so you can plug in any external programs or utilities specific to your needs. These become available to the data analyst in the user interface.
Data Mash-ups
SAP AppComm can connect SAP with virtually any application or data source, everything from electronic instruments to databases, web services, and SaaS applications. Seamless hand-offs with existing middleware technologies is equally simple. Other SAP connectivity tools tend to be limited to specific a specific application, data format, middleware, or business module.
SAP AppComm has the inherent ability to handle “many-to-many” data transformations at run time. It is easy to create relationships and look-ups across applications. In other words, if you have data coming from a web service, some from a spreadsheet, and other data from a database, you can define relationships and mapping, as complex as needed, and the AppComm will resolve them at run time when the data is transferred. One huge benefit of this is that it is not necessary to have a staging database simply for the purpose of accommodating the inherent restrictions of one-to-one integration mapping. That means eliminating the design, building, and maintenance of a staging data base.
IDocs & RFC Support
SAP AppComm generates IDOCs, and can also serve as an IDOCs server, which monitors for and consumes outgoing IDOCs pushed by SAP. Alternatively, bi-directional RFCs are also supported. With appropriate permissions, data can be discovered and extracted directly from the SAP database, and Netweaver web service based integration is also supported.
The bottom line is that AppComm for SAP is the easiest, most cost-effective and efficient way to achieve secure, agile flow of information across the enterprise.