SAP

[bradford]

It'll be easy to know more than me about SAP. I know nothing. There's a chance we'll have to tap into the SAP system at our agency. I've tried to find connectivity details about the two working together.

Nothing.

So, what is SAP based on and can it talk to FM? Or perhaps just export to.

[Ted S]

SAP is the largest ERP software vendor in the world. I have not used their system myself but know a bit about it from talking with others.

It is a MASSIVE system that lots of options and modules. I think the backend is typically an Oracle DB but I could be wrong. Some large companies will spend tens of millions of dollars implementing SAP. If you're dealing with one of these guys my bet is that they won't take kindly to an uncertified system such as FM feeding it information. You will likely be able to pull info from it into FM but it may take an SAP expert to help locate the info in the first place. Again, I'm guessing here but I would think a typical FM database has a couple dozen tables whereas a typical SAP system probably has a few thousand.

[mattley]

Ted S has it pretty much, SAP will run on most of the big DB engines, Oracle as mentioned, MS SQL Server, MySQL, and DB2, so the actual ODBC bit isn't an issue. Complexity however can be, on the last SAP system I worked with sp_help returned about 47000 objects

Getting info out can range from the trivial to the extremly complex. Sales and order data is pretty straight forward, business process data can use views extensively and be a little more difficult.

SAP had a myriad of methods for data interchange. The best I've found has been to create a custom table which is populated by FM and then get a SAP ABAP developer to write a routine to take that data into SAP.