SAP NetWeaver Component Integration Models

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.

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.

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.

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.

SAP Centered Information Life Cycle Management Architectures and ECM

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.

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.