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cyclingfisch_
Active Contributor

After CodeJams around SAP Mobile, HANA and ABAP on HANA we will host our fourth SAP CodeJam. This time again in our office right in the middle of Stuttgart. It will take place on 6th February 2015, 1.00 p.m. And who knows, maybe there will be the delicious steaks again :wink:

The topic will be SAP Gateway for Microsoft. Our expert from SAP will be holger.bruchelt.

I'm already really looking forward to the event because I think Gateway for Microsoft simplifies the integration of SAP and Microsoft Office applications. It can improve the usability a lot.

There are employees who do not work the whole day with the SAP system, but they have to approve e.g. purchase orders. To do so, the user has to log on to the SAP system, navigate to his inbox and finally he can give his approval. Why not bringing these workitems into his Outlook tasks? That's exactly one of the use cases for SAP Gateway for Microsoft.

Another use case are leave requests (bjoern.goerke called leave requests once "the new hello world" but it's a good example anyway). Most of us maintain their vacations in the Outlook calendar. But we have to request the leave in SAP as well. Why not creating the leave request in SAP just when I create the calendar entry in Outlook?

As an ABAP developer I have to deal with interfaces to Microsoft Excel in actually every project. Gateway for Microsoft can really simplify this. The user can easily consume a Gateway service with in Excel, extract the data from SAP and manipulate them in Excel and just write the data back into the SAP system. The data entered by the user get even validated in Excel. As the OData service exposes the data types, Excel can already check if the entered data are of the right type. The same applies for the F4 value helps. SAP Gateway uses annotations to publish the possible values for an attribute and these values are used for the input helper within Excel. So no longer crashing SAP Excel interface because of invalid data. Gateway takes also care of version conflicts. So if you exported data to Excel, you changed them and you want to update them in SAP and in the meantime somebody changed the same data in SAP, SAP Gateway takes care of the conflict.

But what's technically behind Gateway for Microsoft? For the Outlook integration, there is a plug-in for Microsoft VisualStudio. This is used for creating an Outlook add-in. A ready to use PoC add-in can be build within minutes and you do not even need to know C#. You just select the Gateway Service you want to use and then Visual Studio generates the coding for you based on the meta data of the Gateway Service. Of course, a C# developer can make it shiny and add some features. But the basic functionality will be there within a few minutes. By the way, this one of the many possibilities to access your SAP data from within a SharePoint web part - an important vlaue add to SharePoint that Microsoft pursues in its Business Critical SharePoint program.

You might say, we've got just Fiori as a new UI, why should we again start with a new technology? Actually it's no new technology. It's just a new UI for your Gateway services. You can use all the Gateway services which where installed on your system for Fiori with Gateway for Microsoft.

During the CodeJam you will have the chance to get some first hands-on experience. You can work you through tutorials while experts from SAP will support you if needed. At our last CodeJams we always had really good discussions with all the developers about the technology we were working with. All what you need is your notebook. And don't forget to ask your .net developers to join as well!

You can register here for free: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sap-codejam-stuttgart-registration-13995654379

I hope to meet you there!

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