ERP giant SAP and Microsoft yesterday announced integration between NetWeaver and Microsoft’s planned Visual Studio 2005 developer tools, BizTalk Server, Exchange, SharePoint Services and Office System.
SAP is also joining Microsoft’s Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program, to help drive integration so that Windows developers can build applications for NetWeaver and SAP using their familiar Visual Studio integrated development suite.
Announced at SAP’s annual Sapphire conference in New Orleans, Florida, the roadmap follows several years during which SAP has been moving ever closer to Java. SAP is a member of the Java Community Process (JCP), Java Tools Community (JTC) and Eclipse open source tools framework, whilst SAP has taken steps to drive interoperability between Java and its proprietary ABAP architecture.
These steps included re-writing SAP’s application server last year, for compatibility with Sun Microsystems Inc’s official Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification.
An outright commitment to .NET, though has been apparently lacking, and risked posing a potential problem for SAP who is attempting to position NetWeaver as an integration layer that sits above platforms from Microsoft, IBM Corp and others. By overlooking the Microsoft developer camp, SAP has risked excluding millions of Windows programmers from its NetWeaver story, potentially limiting NetWeaver’s uptake.
Yesterday’s agreement potentially fills that gap. SAP plans an enterprise portal software developer kit (SDK) that plugs into Visual Studio.NET, with a beta due this summer, while support for Visual Basic.NET is added to SAP.NET Connector 2.0 due this August – Visual Basic is used by more than three million developers.
Sample applications are planned for developers providing access to SAP systems from Microsoft’s Office and Visual Studio 2005, with a smart client user interface and SDK.
On the server and web services side, the next version of NetWeaver will support latest web services protocols for interoperability with BizTalk Server, while repository managers that integrate NatWeaver’s knowledge management function is planned for Windows SharePoint Services and Exchange Server in 2005.
A jointly staffed SAP and Microsoft support is planned with a Collaboration Technology Support Center (CTSC) in SAP’s hometown of Walldorf, and the companies will collaborate on sales and marketing to drive uptake of SAP on Microsoft systems.
