Information Integration

Information Integration makes both structured and unstructured information available in the enterprise in a consistent and accessible manner:
Users demand ubiquitous access to information wherever it resides. That information must be served in a consistent manner and its integrity guaranteed.

• Knowledge management (KM) - Knowledge management with user-centric services provides a single access point to SAP's content management system and third-party repositories -- with integrated search, taxonomy, classification, content management, publishing, and related workflow processes.

Knowledge Management (KM) is the umbrella term for the management of unstructured information - that is, all kinds of documents. The knowledge management (KM) capability of the SAP Enterprise Portal (EP) turns unstructured information into organizational knowledge - an essential function in this age of global e-business. The KM capability is powered by SAP NetWeaver.

• Business intelligence (BI) - This capability enables you to integrate, analyze, and disseminate relevant and timely information. It is delivered through SAP Business Intelligence, which provides a robust suite of business intelligence tools to help you create and deploy customized, interactive reports and applications, supporting decisions at every level.

One of the core components of SAP NetWeaver is SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW), which covers the following functional areas:

• Data warehousing, which forms the application-neutral foundation for Business Intelligence. SAP BW supports the complete data warehousing process, from data integration, data transformation, consolidation and cleansing to data provision for analysis.

• A business intelligence platform that serves as the technological infrastructure to support information access and comprehensive analytics.

• Business intelligence suite that transforms data into insightful information and serves a wide variety of users for decision-making.

As part of the SAP NetWeaver architecture, SAP BW draws from and utilizes the capabilities of the other components for business intelligence usage. The sum of the functionality of SAP BW and the contribution of other components of SAP NetWeaver form a BI platform that represents the next major step in the evolution of business intelligence.

SAP NetWeaver is the technical foundation for all SAP applications as well as partners' products and solutions. With Analytical Applications that run on top of SAP NetWeaver and business content that goes across all functional areas of SAP BW, SAP offers a comprehensive solution: mySAP Business Intelligence.

• Master data management (MDM) - This capability promotes information integrity across a business network in a heterogeneous IT environment. It enables the sharing of harmonized master data formerly trapped in multiple systems and ensures cross-system data consistency -- regardless of system location or vendor. This capability is delivered through SAP Master Data Management.

Today, companies operating within heterogeneous IT landscapes are commonplace, and the demand for streamlining communication within such an environment is great. True Enterprise Application Integration must be geared towards the technical harmonization of a diversified infrastructure and the consolidation of business-critical data.

SAP Master Data Management (SAP MDM) - a key capability of SAP NetWeaver - enables information integrity across the business network. It enables companies to store, augment, and consolidate master data, while ensuring consistent distribution to all applications and systems within the IT landscape. It leverages existing IT investments in business-critical data, delivering vastly reduced data maintenance costs through effective data management. And, by ensuring cross-system data consistency, SAP MDM accelerates the execution of business processes, greatly improves decision-making and helps companies maintain their competitive advantage.

Life Cycle Management (LCM)

SAP NetWeaver provides centralized technology for all stages of the software life-cycle, including design, development, deployment, implementation, versioning, testing, and ongoing operations. Web Dynpro supports a model-driven development methodology for building professional Web user interfaces.

Implementation

Fast, cost-effective configuration of the IT system marks the beginning of the lifecycle. Implementation involves the sizing, installation, and configuration of e-business solutions including integrated data migration and testing.

E-business solutions place exacting demands on an IT infrastructure. SAP offers a proven, cost-effective sizing methodology to determine the hardware requirements of an SAP e-business solution.

More than ever, e-business requires fast installation procedures for the components that build the e-business solution.

The configuration functionality allows a convenient analysis and optimization of business processes, tailored to customers' needs.

Unless you are a start-up or already an SAP customer, you have an existing set of data and information that has to be migrated into your e-business solution. To perform a data migration from an existing legacy system to SAP e-business solutions, SAP provides complete planning and resource checking capabilities of the migration process.

New and existing e-business processes and procedures need to be checked against functional, formal and performance requirements. A testing phase completes the implementation process and is supported by SAP through a broad-spectrum of planning and execution services.

Operations

Staying continuously online is a prerequisite in the world of e-business. Easily managing heterogeneous environments while guaranteeing high performance and high availability, plus securely doing business over the Web, results in reliable operation.

A flexible and efficient e-business solution is built on component-based architecture. In real environments, the components typically operate in a heterogeneous landscape. SAP provides a global system management environment to ensure the manageability of all business components, databases, and networks from a single location.

A successful business is a growing business that requires a scalable infrastructure. SAP has clearly set the standard on how to achieve high performance e-business computing.

E-business solutions require availability around the clock all year long. Together with platform partners, SAP supports mission-critical e-business processes with best practice procedures for assuring the highest availability.

Without security there is no e-business. The secure exchange of data and information between all community members and services is crucial.

Continuous Change

E-business processes change constantly, and your e-business solution changes with them. To meet changing demands, the system infrastructure, processes, and services have to be continuously extended and improved. This includes upgrading, change management, and scaling.

Keeping your e-business solution up to date is vital for achieving and extending competitive advantage. An upgrade may involve the addition of functional or country-specific components or the inclusion of new technologies.

For the ongoing improvement of business processes, SAP delivers comprehensive change management capabilities to organize and flexibly implement projects for customizing, add-ons, interfaces, and modifications.

You have to grow with your e-business solution operationally, functionally, and geographically. SAP's proven scalability ensures that its e-business solutions meet the needs of any company

People Integration

People Integration brings together the right functionality and the right information to the right people:

On the people level, end users will settle for nothing less than a seamless user experience (in spite of the growing system diversity), boundless collaboration functionality, and pervasive access.

• Portal infrastructure - This capability provides industry-leading portal technology that delivers unified, personalized, and role-based user access to your heterogeneous IT environment. Portal infrastructure is provided through SAP Enterprise Portal.

The SAP Enterprise Portal is unifying the applications, information and services existing in an enterprise into one system. It is a personalized, interactive gateway, providing employees, partners, suppliers and customers with a single point of access. The SAP Enterprise Portal can be accessed through multiple devices from anywhere at any time and delivers relevance to the user, eliminates traditional barriers to productivity and dramatically accelerates business throughput…

• Collaboration -- Collaboration promotes dynamic communication within permanent and ad hoc teams or communities -- including shared e-mail, calendars, threaded discussions, and document stores.

Collaboration simply means working together. In the context of the modern organization, however, collaboration is likely to be anything but simple. To collaborate, people depend on a multitude of technologies ranging from the phone and e-mail to sophisticated project management tools. Collaboration may also require the sharing of news items, internal documents, data from deep within an organization's transactional systems, or interacting on someone else's screen. What's more, the people involved may be in offices across the country or around the world - or they may not be in an office at all…

• Multi-channel access -- With multi-channel access, you can connect to enterprise systems through voice, mobile, or radio-frequency technology. Multi-channel access is delivered through Mobile Infrastructure.

mySAP Mobile Business solutions enable enterprises to mobilize their existing investment through a universal platform and ready-made scenarios to all popular devices in both connected and disconnected environments.

• SAP Mobile Engine - Installed locally on a mobile device, the SAP Mobile Engine includes its own Web server, database layer, and business logic – all part of a light-installation run-time environment that extends enterprise capabilities to users whether or not they're connected to the network. Learn more about SAP Mobile Engine.

• Connected Technology - Connected scenarios requiring no install on a device can be deployed inside the walls of the enterprise via Wireless-LAN or on-the-road via connection with mobile data networks (GPRS, iMode, etc.). Learn more about the connected technologies in the SAP Web Application Server.
  

			SAP NetWeaver
			People Integration Information Integration Process Integration Application Framework
			... .NET WebSphere

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People Integration brings functionality and information to people. On the people level, end users will settle for nothing less than a seamless user experience (in spite of the growing system diversity), boundless collaboration functionality, and pervasive access.

• Multi-Channel Access - With multi-channel access, you can connect to enterprise systems through voice, mobile, or radio-frequency technology. Multi-channel access is delivered through Mobile Infrastructure.

• Portal - This capability provides industry-leading portal technology that delivers unified, personalized, and role-based user access to your heterogeneous IT environment. Portal infrastructure is provided through SAP Enterprise Portal.

• Collaboration - Collaboration promotes dynamic communication within permanent and ad hoc teams or communities -- including shared e-mail, calendars, threaded discussions, and document stores.

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Information Integration

Information Integration makes both structured and unstructured information available in the enterprise in a consistent and accessible manner. Users demand ubiquitous access to information wherever it resides. That information must be served in a consistent manner and its integrity guaranteed.

• Business Intelligence - This capability enables you to integrate, analyze, and disseminate relevant and timely information. It is delivered through SAP Business Intelligence, which provides a robust suite of business intelligence tools to help you create and deploy customized, interactive reports and applications, supporting decisions at every level.

• Knowledge Management - Knowledge management with user-centric services provides a single access point to SAP's content management system and third-party repositories -- with integrated search, taxonomy, classification, content management, publishing, and related workflow processes.

• Master Data Management - This capability promotes information integrity across a business network in a heterogeneous IT environment. It enables the sharing of harmonized master data formerly trapped in multiple systems and ensures cross-system data consistency -- regardless of system location or vendor. This capability is delivered through SAP Master Data Management.

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Process Integration

Process Integration enables business processes to run seamlessly across heterogeneous IT landscapes:
The business processes that span systems and organizations have to be well orchestred and offer high performance.

• Integration Broker - This capability enables XML/SOAP-based communication between application components from various sources and vendors. It also enables you to define software components, interfaces, mappings, and content-based routing rules. This capability is delivered through SAP Exchange Infrastructure.

• Business Process Management - With business process management, you can model and drive processes in a dynamic IT environment. It allows you to combine underlying applications into adaptive, end-to-end processes spanning the entire value chain.

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Application Platform

The application platform of SAP NetWeaver is the SAP Web Application Server. It provides a complete infrastructure to develop, deploy and run platform-independent, robust and scalable Web Services and business applications. To allow this flexibility, different technologies have been established.

• J2EE - The standard of developing multi-tier enterprise application based on Java. This standard has been defined by an open community, including SAP, and has been driven forward by SUN Microsytems Inc.

• ABAP - ABAP has been developed for business application programming. One of its essential application areas is the processing of data from the central database. Many of the functions required for this are included in the language content and do not have to be programmed in ABAP itself.

• DB and OS Abstraction - platform-independence - there is huge business value in not being dependent on a specific platform.

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Security - Data security at transaction level is a prerequisite to competing in the Internet economy. SAP offers best-in-class, comprehensive security solutions that protect data and ensure the confidentiality of business transactions. As a global solution provider and trusted advisor, SAP provides security technologies to protect the data processed by the mySAP Business Suite. The security infrastructure of SAP NetWeaver delivers comprehensive security features for heterogeneous environments. Combined with specialized partner solutions, its state-of-the-art technology makes mySAP Business Suite the secure place to do business. For information on specific security-related topics, see Security in Detail

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Solution Life-Cycle Management
SAP NetWeaver provides centralized technology for all stages of the software life-cycle, including design, development, deployment, implementation, versioning, testing, and ongoing operations. Web Dynpro supports a model-driven development methodology for building professional Web user interfaces.

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Composite Application Framework
SAP Composite Application Framework provides a robust environment for the design and use of SAP xApps and composite applications that comply with Enterprise Services Architecture. SAP Composite Application Framework comprises design tools, methodologies, services and processes, an abstraction layer for objects, and user interface and process pattern libraries.