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Integration of business processes with XML
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Abstract
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Business process integration is a major issue within mySAP.com. SAP
offers workplace and marketplace technology that uses XML because of its high
importance for the communication in the internet. The presentation will cover
SAP's current use of XML in their technology and its vision for the future
of XML in the eCommerce area.
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Contents
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The integration of business processes over the Internet is the basis
for a worldwide e-Commerce Network in which sooner or later all
companies will participate. This integration requires a globally accepted
communication language which is powerful enough to express the requirements
of the BUSINESS world as well as the TECHNICAL world. With XML a language
has been created with which these requirements can already be met today or
which at least holds the potential to meet them.
The WWW consortium sets the technological standards for XML. Hence,
a worldwide competition for the standards in the business area has started.
Quality and speediness will become critical factors.
However, this is only the start of a development leading to a document-based
communication and processing of information. Advantages are
- reliable asynchronous processing
- processing with defined steps matching customer requirements
- loose coupling of business processes by precise separation and interfaces
As a language for this kind of processing XML will play a major role.
However, in the first place XML stands for a standardized, generic and easily
extensible language. To breathe life into it some more building blocks are
necessary:
- 1. A technical communication infrastructure, which enables us to offer the exchange of XML documents, the mapping of contents and all other typical Middleware Services like security, directory, etc. Further important aspects for the processing are high scalability, stability and performance.
- 2. A process component which enables a controlled and flexible processing of XML documents. Part of such a component is a kind of protocol, which generally rules the execution and sequence of the process. This is another area where standards are of advantage as they allow to externally extend the XML documents with the respective information. SAP is intensively doing research and development in this area to be able to offer a solution in medium-term.
- 3. The definition of business documents for all essential business data.
Up to present the market has not been able to achieve an agreement on
how the guidelines for the description of business data within the XML area
should be defined. Although XML has been stipulated as the basis language
a customer master data set, for example, can still be described in several
ways similar to a programming language which does not sufficiently define
how a program should look like.