Appendix A. Connecting to SAP with the BDC
Probably the best way to understand a system that’s in place is to work backward from the end to the beginning. Understanding what’s in place and the purpose of each layer will help you in the forward planning of the system that you want to implement. We’ll use two examples to convey both the use of the data and the technical implementation. The two entities we’ll use are suppliers and customers. In this example, SAP data is available via SharePoint Search and also, in the case of the supplier data, ends up populating a SharePoint custom list. Note that there’s an overlap between the supplier and customer data.
In the following paragraphs, we’ll look at the data in SAP, look at it in SharePoint, and review what artifacts have to be in place to support surfacing the data into SharePoint via the BDC. As such, the first stop will be to review getting to the customer data in SAP via the traditional GUI.