Book Image

Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration

Book Image

Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration

Overview of this book

Microsoft BizTalk is an integration and connectivity server solution that allows businesses to connect disparate systems easily. In today’s business climate of mergers and acquisitions, more and more enterprises are forced to exchange data across disparate Line of Business systems using integration brokers like BizTalk Server 2010. What is often overlooked when integrating these systems is the pre-requisite knowledge that ERP and CRM systems demand in order to effectively integrate them. No longer is this knowledge locked up in the heads of expensive consultants. Gain an edge within your organization by developing valuable skills in the area of Line of Business integration from this book.This book will show you how to integrate BizTalk with Line of Business systems using practical scenarios. Each chapter will take a Line of Business system, introduce some pre-requisite knowledge and demonstrate how you can integrate BizTalk with that Line of Business system, and then provide guidance based upon real world experience, taking your BizTalk knowledge further.This book will enable you to master how to integrate BizTalk with Line of Business systems effectively. The book starts by highlighting the technical foundation of WCF-LOB adapters and the common steps and important properties pertaining to popular WCF-LOB adapters. You will then move on to an overview of how to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server using the WCF based SQL Server adapter. The book then dives into topics such as integrating BizTalk Server with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, building BizTalk/SAP integrated solutions using IDocs, the differences between IDocs and RFCs/BAPIs, and integrating BizTalk with Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus amongst others.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Overview of SAP RFCs and BAPIs


The terms RFC and BAPI are often used interchangeably, especially by non-SAP resources. Technically, they are very similar but operate at two different levels of detail. Over the course of this next section, we will further discover the similarities and differences between these two technologies.

RFCs

RFC stands for Remote Function Call and is the standard SAP interface when exchanging data across SAP systems or between non-SAP systems and SAP systems. You can think of an RFC much like a C# method, the difference being SAP provides an interface that allows for communication with SAP systems. There are three different types of RFCs:

RFC Type

Description

Synchronous RFC

As the name implies, this type of RFC utilizes request-response connectivity when exchanging information between SAP and SAP systems or SAP and Non-SAP systems. This is probably the most popular type of RFC due to the popularity of Request-Response requirements.

Transactional RFC (tRFC)...