Customer Reviews

SAP Exchange Infrastructure

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This was a very difficult book to read because it is so incredibly dry, like many other SAP Press books.

It provides an excellent overview of SAP XI, and explains the architecture very well. It also gives very good business examples. Unfortunately, I was looking for something much more technical, and this was not detailed enough for me. I had much better luck figuring out how to use XI on my own rather than reading this book.

Perhaps I just had the wrong idea as to what sort of a book this was.

This is an excellent book on XI, and I am not sure what the other reviewers where expecting from this book. I can agree that sometimes the language in the books a little difficult to understand, but that would not stop me from recommending this book to other XI users. Author provides an in-depth analysis for each component in XI. Here is how the book is organized:

Chapter 1 and 2 are essential for understanding all subsequent chapters, fundamentals of XI are explained here. Chapters 3 through 5 concentrate on design and development with SAP XI independently of specific system landscape. Chapter 6 summarizes everything discussed in previous chapters: It describes how you can configure the cross-system process for a specific system landscape, based on the developments made at the logical level. The order in which the topics are addressed reflects the chronological order of the corresponding steps in the SAP XI integration project. Chapter 7, which deals with SAP XI runtime, could be read concurrently with all other chapters. Chapter 8 completes the first part of the book with its description of the cross -component BPM, which marks the transition from stateless to stateful communication.

To illustrate how SP XI is applied in a business context, the second part of the book examines two customer scenarios that have been realized with SAP XI. Chapter 9 describes how cross-component BPM is used as part of an XI scenario at the Linde Group. Chapter 10 shows how the B2B features of SAP XI help connect a CRM system to an electronic marketplace over the Internet.

This book is worth while reading through if you dont know what SAP XI (PI) is. But if you have some XI (PI) experience and is looking for answers or good examples, please check elsewhere or on-line instead.

The book explains how a programmer might use the SAP API for Exchange. There is much detail provided by SAP, with additional explanations given by the book's authors. For example, we see that the Mapping Editor can be used to provide a graphical view of an XML document. Though the graphics are somewhat constrained if you have a very long document.

Messaging is an important part of EI. We are shown how to exchange messages. This EI aspect can also be hooked up to a Java Message Service. Where here, messaging is not email, in general. But data packets that might be used by external Web Services.

The book shows inadvertantly why JMX proved so useless in practise. EI offers management control functionality for SAP processes that is equivalent to what JMX once promised for controlling distributed java applications. Alas, JMX was too general. Whereas EI gives specific control hooks into an already well accepted and popular SAP package.