Exam 70-542: TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Application Development

Hi folks,

It’s time to get MOSS Development certificate now. I’ve been coding custom web parts almost for a year now. Just like any other IT speciality area, you can’t get a wide vision over a topic different from the one you are working on unless you study that topic in detail from A to Z. Most of the time, best and a more structured way to do so is to study for its certification exam.

MOSS is a big beast in IT market now, and without doubt a MOSS development certificate can help an IT worker gain lots of opportunities.

Folks, let’s go for it!

zieglers

P.S. Here is the preparation guide: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-542.mspx

SAP - .NET Interoperability and DUET

When it comes to SAP - .NET Interoperability projects out in the market, I realized that there are many confusions in decision makers’ minds. One of the biggest confusions are which tools to use and what their capabilities are.

Here I want to mention specifically DUET. Many managers I met at pre-sales activities seemed to me like they heard about DUET being the ultimate SAP - .NET Interop tool. This is very misleading.

The first reason this being misleading actually results from the fact that managers tend to not define their specific interoperability goals. What is the desired functionality once the project is done? Is it business process interoperability? Is it document management interoperability? Is it archiving, full-text searching, … etc?

Here is a little comparison for DUET. What it is and what it is NOT… What you can do and what you CAN’T do with DUET.

Fact 1: DUET is for business process integration tool for SAP and Microsoft environments.

Fact 2: Fact 1 is very promising Let’s be more specific. Fact 2 says, DUET is for business process integration which can be used through MS Outlook. So, this means that you can reach SAP info from Outlook and read, modify, delete some SAP business objects.

Fact 3: Fact 2 implicitly states that DUET is all to do with SAP Business Objects. It has nothing to do with documents and Document Management capabilities of SAP.

Fact 4: UI for DUET is MS Outlook.

Fact 5: DUET is NOT a middle-ware. It is a business integrator.

Here is also a list showing what you can do with DUET:

• Manage Time
    calendar integration with SAP ERP
• Monitor & Manage Budget (mission critical)
    alert created by SAP ERP
• Implement Management Process
    giving bonus to an employee
    auto entry of approval request
• Manage vacation and other leave requests
    leave request
• Request and Plan Travel
    trip request and workflow for approval
• View Analytics and Reports
    sales performance dashboard
• Manage Sales Activities
• Manage Purchase Approvals
    approve laptop purchase
   

For a quick DUET demo, please visit: http://www.duet.com/Portals/0/Flash/demo/v2/index.html

Here is also a list showing what you can NOT do with DUET:

• Can’t manage documents residing in SAP.
• Can’t manage SAP content repositories.
• Can’t communicate with ArchiveLink and KPro.
• Can’t integrate MOSS and SAP for fulltext searching.
• Can’t be used as an archiving solution.
• Can’t be used as an workflow solution.
• Can’t be used for managing nearline storage devices.
• Can’t be used as an HSM.

… conclusion comes here …

zieglers

Exam 70-445: TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence – Implementation and Maintenance

 

Hi folks,

Please write your comments re 70-445 exam here.

I’ll update this post soon…

zieglers

Book Review: Next Generation ABAP Development (SAP Press)

 

I realized that it’s been couple of months I didn’t post anything, so I wanted to break this silence with a short book review. I’ve recently bought an SAP book named ‘Next Generation ABAP Development’. As the name of the book states, it mentions the new features coming with ABAP release 7.0.

 What I really liked about this book is that it uses a single real-world example throughout the book. While reading the book, you never get lost in the details, since the development of the example can be followed along with a lead ABAP developer as he develops this custom course booking system for a university upgrading from SAP R/3 4.6C to SAP NetWeaver 7.0.

It definitely worths buying. Also all code examples come within CD enclosed.

I’ll start implementing the example project soon. If you want to discuss about issues and share experiences through implementation process, you are more than welcome!

zieglers

Calling an SAP BAPI method using VB Script

 

If you are in need of calling a BAPI method using VB Script, it may mean that probably you already searched for this, tried several VB Script samples that you found from the web, tried to modify them and couldn’t manage to work. That’s why you are reading this post now

There are a number of things to be done before you attemp to call a BAPI using vb script. First of all, you should have ‘SAP.BAPI.1′ in your registry already. This means that you’d better have latest SAP GUI installed on the machine you are gonna run your script.

Secondly, just having your method being RFC-Enabled if not enough. There should be a corresponding SAP Business Object for it, and you should be able to browse this object in BAPI Explorer (Transaction: BAPI). I won’t give the details of creating an SAP Business Object in this post now. I just wanna warn you that you shouldn’t try to create an instance of your RFC-Enabled method, instead you should get an instance of the related business object!

Here is the sample code

====================

Option Explicit
Dim oBAPICtrl        ‘BAPI Control
Dim oConnection      ‘Connection object
Dim Logon            ‘Logon help variable
Dim oLoadPDF

Dim oArcid
Dim oIndir
Dim oGTDATA
Dim oReturn

oArcid = “XY”
oIndir = “C:\test”
‘Creating BAPI object
Set oBAPICtrl = CreateObject(”SAP.BAPI.1″)

‘Creating Connection object
Set oConnection = oBAPICtrl.Connection
oConnection.Client = “010″
oConnection.User = “YOURUSERNAME”
oConnection.Language = “EN”
oConnection.ApplicationServer = “yourserveraddress”
oConnection.Password = “YOURPASSWORD”
oConnection.SystemNumber = “00″
‘Performing a remote logon to the R/3 System
If oConnection.Logon(0, True) <> True Then    ‘Logon with dialog
      Set oConnection = Nothing
      Logon = False
      MsgBox “No access to R/3 System”, vbOKOnly, APPID
Else
     Logon = True
End If
If Logon Then
 MsgBox “Logged on successfully…”
End If
Set oLoadPDF = oBAPICtrl.GetSAPObject(”ZZ_YOUR_BUSINESS_OBJECT_NAME”)

If Err.Number <> 0 Then
      MsgBox “failed on oBAPICtrl.GetSAPObject(”ZZ_YOUR_BUSINESS_OBJECT_NAME”)…”
Else
      MsgBox “SAP Object created successfully…”
End If
If oLoadPDF.Loadpdf(oArcid, oIndir, oGTDATA, oReturn) <> True Then    ‘Call LOADPDF function
 MsgBox “LOADPDF Function called successfully…”
Else
 MsgBox “LOADPDF Function call failed”
End If

Set oLoadPDF = Nothing
Set oConnection = Nothing
Set oBAPICtrl = Nothing

====================

In this LoadPdf function, i was just calling some frontend upload functions to upload pdf files to sap server and start some workflow. I left the signature of the method intentionally so that you can see that return variable is also included while calling the method.

Also, note that this code is logging on SAP system in silent mode –> oConnection.Logon(0, True)

Here is the link of a VB sample from SAP Help site: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_46c/helpdata/en/76/4a42f7f16d11d1ad15080009b0fb56/content.htm

Hope, this helps…

zieglers

Exam 70-547: PRO: Designing and Developing Web-Based Applications by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework

 

Today I passed Exam 70-547 : PRO: Designing and Developing Web-Based Applications by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework with a score of 1000/1000 There are 40 questions in the exam, no simulations. I even didn’t get any drag & drop question.

 … to be completed …

Exam 70-630: TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring

 

I wrote Exam 70-630: TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring and passed with 1000/1000.

Exam has 51 questions. There are no simulations, no cases. If we compare this exam with 70-631: TS: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring, one can see that this exam is more related to sites, search, metadata, content types, content management, business forms, business intelligence, …

Below you can find a detailed analysis on questions and keywords related to them. 

1. Crawling, Full Crawl
2. User Profiles (2)
3. Content Migration (2)
4. Business Data List Web Part
5. CMS Assessment Tool
6. Excel Services
7. List View Web Part
8. Text Filter
9. Report Center (2)
10. Business Data Catalog (BDC)
11. Disclaimer
12. E-Mail Alerts
13. Organizing Content
14. Personal Sites
15. Intranet & Extranet Access
16. Single Sign-On
17. Audience (2)
18. Broken Links
19. Usage Reports
20. New Feature Installation
21. Referrers
22. User Administration
23. Scheduled Maintenance
24. Deployment
25. Logging
26. Form Templates
27. Language Options
28. Customization
29. Workflow
30. Information Right Management (IRM)
31. Versioning
32. Auditing
33. Record Routing
34. Metadata (2)
35. Content Types
36. Navigation & Links
37. Web Service Proxy
38. Performance
39. Permissions (2)
40. Publishing
41. Universal Data Connection (UDC)
42. Custom & Managed Properties
43. iFilter
44. Search (6)

As you also can see from the above topic distribution, “Search” is a hot topic and needs to be known in details. Since this is a MOSS exam, not WSS 3.0, there are detailed questions related to “Site Templates” as well. Administration type of questions are kept minimal.

Hope, you all pass your exam w/o any problem… As usual, please share your experiences, comments or concerns…

Let’s discuss ‘em all together…

 zieglers

P.S. Folks! Please don’t send comments including your e-mail addresses, material download problems, … etc. My aim is NOT to share exam dumps here. I wanna discuss exam related questions here… Thanks for your understanding…

Exam 70-631: TS: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring

 

Yesterday I wrote my first SharePoint exam, 70-631: TS: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring, and got 1000/1000.

The exam has 41 questions, no simulations and no case studies. All of them are multiple choice.

As always, we can start discussing the questions here in this post.

 zieglers

SAP vs. ERP

 

Most of the time you hear the word ‘ERP’ along with SAP. So what is ERP and what is SAP?

Here is a small description for them.

*** What is ERP? ***
*ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning.
Enterprise Resource Planning systems integrate all data and processes of an organization into unified system.
The key feature of an ERP system is it uses a single or unified database to store data for the various system modules.
Various Modules which comes under ERP are listed below:

a.            Manufacturing

b.           Supply Chain

c.            Financials

d.           CRM

e.           Human Resources

f.             Warehouse management

*** What is SAP? ***
*SAP stands for Systems Applications and Products in data processing.
SAP is the 4th largest software company in the world. It ranks after Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.
SAP Head quarters are in Walldorf, Germany. SAP was founded in 1972 by five former IBM engineers.

SAP released SAP R/2 version initially. The architecture of R/2 system is Mainframe architecture.
Later SAP R/3 is released which is different from R/2 architecture. R stands for Real time. 3 stands for 3 tier architecture.
There are over 100,800 installations at more than 28,000 companies.

SAP products are used by 12 million people in more than 120 countries.

zieglers

SAP R/3 IDES 4.7*200 SR1 Installation on Windows 2003 R3 and SQL Server 2005

Intro 

In this post, I’d like to share my experience on installing SAP R/3 IDES 4.7*200 SR1. IDES stands for ‘International Demonstration and Education System’. That means SAP R/3 IDES comes with many example scenarios, best practices and preconfigured environment for demonstration and education purposes. 

To have a clean and more manageable installation environment, I decided to do the installation on a virtual hard drive (.vhd). Basically, I installed SAP R/3 to a virtual machine. It took quite a long time but eventually I managed to complete the installation after 3 days J

Installation Environment 

I got a 250 GB usb external hard drive and formatted it to NTFS (This also takes at least 2 hours.). Then I copied necessary installation DVDs/CDs to that drive and extracted them there. If you do just opposite, it can also take a couple of more hours as well. I’ll mention installation CDs in the following section in detail. I created an additional 130 GB virtual hdd just to host SAP installation and attached it to VPC as drive E:. I recommend you to install and keep all SAP related files in another partition for the ease of manageability and monitoring. System Details are as follows: 

• OS: Windows Server 2003 R2
• RAM: 1280 MB
• HDD:  C: 20 GB, E: 130 GB
• DB: MS SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition
  • Collation: Binary order, for use with the 850 (Multilingual) Character Set.

 Prerequisites 

All installation media mentioned below can be downloaded from SAP Market Place. https://websmp207.sap-ag.de/swdc (logon required) 

SAP GUI: Installations and Upgrades à SAP Frontend Components à SAP GUI FOR WINDOWS à 6.20 / 6.40 / 7.10 (In the context of this post, I used SAP GUI for Windows 6.20) 

Installation Guide: (IWNSQL_A110.pdf)SAP® R/3 Enterprise ABAP on Windows:MS SQL Server Using SAP R/3 Enterprise Core 4.70,SAP R/3 Enterprise Extension Set 2.00, Service Release 1Document Version 1.10 – August 24, 2004 

Installation Type: SAP R/3 Enterprise as a central systemCentral instance and database instance of the SAP R/3 Enterprise system are installed on one host 

Installation DVDs/CDs:

Installations and Upgrades à SAP Application Components à SAP R/3 ENTERPRISE à SAP R/3 ENTERPRISE 47X200 à IDES-Version à Windows Server à MS SQL Server

 

I did a local installation, which means central instance and database instance are on the same host machine. Firstly you need to complete a central installation and then proceed with the database installation. 

SAP Instance Installation Required CD or DVDs Central instance:

·        Database DVD (MS SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Installation DVD)

·        SAP Installation Master CD (51032936_13)

·        SAP Kernel CD (51030499)

·        SAP Web AS Java DVD (includes CD IGS folder IGS_SOFT for the installation of IGS) (51030724_1) 

Database instance for a non-MCOD installation:

·        Database DVD (MS SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Installation DVD)

·        SAP Installation Master CD (51032936_13)

·        SAP Kernel CD (51030499)

·        All Export CDs (51030584_1 … 51030584_16)

 

Installation 

Once everything is ready and all the installation files are extracted, then you are ready to go. At the installation phase you need to choose a unique SAP System ID (for 3 letters). After choosing this ID, make sure that you are not changing it anywhere in the installation. Also you need to come up with 3 system ids: SAP Admin, SQL DB Admin, and SAP Service Admin. 

Make sure that you made the collation with SQL_Latin1_850_CP_Binary, otherwise your installation won’t proceed.  

First you need to make the central installation and then the database installation. For central installation you don’t need all export files. It takes relatively shorter than database installation.  For the database installation, Database Load part takes time. It can take from couple of hours to 1-2 days depending on the host system. Also SAP* and DDIC user passwords should be changed during the installation. 

Post-Installation

Once the installation has been completed successfully, you can start your SAP system. To do this, open SAP Management Console and right click to your recently installed SAP system and click ‘Start’. In a minute or two, all three processes should turn to green. If everything goes ok, the result should be as follows:

 

 

Now you can login to SAP using your SAP GUI. Make sure that you install your SAP GUI before central installation. You can also get SAP GUI from SAP Market Place.

If you have any troubles or questions about the installations, let’s discuss them here. 

Cheers, J 

zieglers