dynamIt launches SAP web interface
By Bobby WhitmanSAP, one of the world’s largest vendors of business software, is the real deal. Since 1972 the Germany-based company has been developing software suites to run every as aspect of even the world’s largest companies. Big or small, SAP has a solution for you. A few months ago dynamIt was approached by a local company who was in process of implementing SAP Business One, the SAP build for the small to medium sized company. Now, SAP is a major player in the software industry today, so of course they have a nice suite of web software to go alongside their products.
But what do you do for your web interface when your business is so unique that you had to have a custom SAP module built?
Answer: call dynamIt.
The Junior Library Guild is a collection development service for public and private libraries all over the country. JLG prides themselves on picking the very best books every year. In fact, the majority of their books later go on to receive various awards such as the Caldecott Medal.
They sell their books in subscriptions much like a book-of-the-month club, but their ordering options are so unique that after implementing SAP in their business they needed a custom module written. Thus, providing them with a e-commerce solution proved to be a rather difficult task.
Enter dynamIt. The folks at JLG recognized that although they were top notch at providing books for libraries, they may not be everyone’s first choice to manage a web project of scale. So, dynamIt was first contracted to spend time on-site learning their business and consulting with their marketing staff to decide what was important in a web system.
After countless hours in the office and in the book warehouse, information architecture was presented and that would guide the rest of the development of the site.
Then came the tricky part. How do we hook up our web application with the massive SAP database? Well, before this we had never worked with SAP, so we thought we’d turn to the vendor that implemented SAP for JLG. No luck.
So, the technical side of dynamIt–Matt, Gordon, and myself–set to some critical thinking and came up with the following plan. There would be three servers, the SAP Production server, the web server, and an intermediary server that lets the two communicate. Some delicate programming to keep everything in sync and we were up and running.
Now, I should note that integrating with SAP was IN NO WAY as easy as I have just made it seem. In fact it was quite difficult, there were several road blocks, bumps, bugs and even a few dead ends along the way. But that is ok, the collective attitude at dynamIt is all about solving every puzzle as tough as it may be.
Tags: Junior Library Guild, SAP, tricky problems, Web interface